Berlin Wall pieces at churches and places of worship

The sites in this collection read the Wall in a register the rest of the atlas does not. At Fátima a 2.6 tonne element set into a memorial and blessed by John Paul II presents the fall of communism as the fulfilment of the 1917 prophecy about Russia; the atlas does not have to endorse that reading, but it is the reason the segment is there. In the Vatican Gardens a Kreuzberg element bought at the Monte Carlo auction carries a painting of St Michael's church in Berlin, a parish the Wall had cut off from most of its congregation, in the garden of the pope widely credited with helping end communist rule in Eastern Europe; the segment unveiled at the Museum of John Paul II in Warsaw on what would have been his hundredth birthday makes the same argument. At Eureka Springs a ten-foot section beside a relocated country church carries the 23rd Psalm in German.

Two of the records describe church bodies that were themselves part of the story. The Ecumenical Centre in Geneva obtained its pair in 1991 at the request of the Conference of European Churches, which had spent four decades keeping the churches in contact across the line and wanted to act, in its own phrase, as an ecumenical Mauerspecht; what the clergy spoke about at the inauguration was the walls still standing between people everywhere. The two in the garden of the Hungarian Maltese Charity Service belong to the body that opened the first camp for East German refugees in Budapest in August 1989 and cared for some 48,600 people over three months. Elsewhere the object is turned to other ends. At the Toukokuji Temple in Osaka two Koreans gave segments to a Korean Buddhist temple with a request that their own country be reunited. At Nagoya the smallest pieces here, fragments sold by the gram at a parish bazaar in 1989, were set into the wall beside the door as a cross. At Essen two painted segments were kept by a parish for eighteen years before a housing development gave them somewhere to stand. And two stand unexplained among the orange trees outside the Santuario de Consolación at Utrera, with no plaque, no date and no donor.