The Italian Chapel

After the medieval cathedral in Kirkwall, the most visited religious site in the Orkneys is probably a small metal church on the uninhabited island of Lamb Holm. This little place was built in 1942-1945 by Italian prisoners of war.

One of the Royal Navy's main anchorages during both World Wars was Scapa Flow, a huge natural harbor in the Orkneys north of Scotland. The British thought they had closed all the subsidiary entrances to the harbor using sunken ships and other barriers. But on the night of October 14, 1939, a daring U-Boat captain named Günther Prien steered his vessel through the barriers and sank the battleship Royal Oak as it rode at anchor. Among the 835 men killed were so many teenage boys that the Admiralty was obliged by Parliamentary pressure to limit the number of such youngsters deployed on warships at sea. 

Then First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill ordered the construction of an elaborate system of causeways and obstacles that were called the Churchill Barriers.

Among the more than 2,000 men who labored on the barriers were 550 Italians who had been captured in North Africa. Sometime during 1943 their priest convinced the British commandant of their camp that these men needed a place of worship.

Wikipedia:

The chapel was constructed from limited materials by the prisoners in the form of a tin tabernacle, and comprises two Nissen huts [Quonset huts to Americans] joined end-to-end. The corrugated interior was then covered with plasterboard and the altar and altar rail were constructed from concrete left over from work on the barriers. Most of the interior decoration was done by Domenico Chiocchetti, a prisoner from Moena in Trentino, northern Italy. He painted the sanctuary end of the chapel and fellow prisoners decorated the entire interior. They created a facade out of concrete, concealing the shape of the hut and making the building look like a church. The light holders were made out of corned beef tins. The baptismal font was made from the inside of a car exhaust covered in a layer of concrete.

Funny that a bunch of male POWs thougt they needed a baptismal font; I guess it was in their minds an essential part of any church.

The church was still unfinished at the end of the war, but some of the Italians returned to complete the job; others participated in the restorations of the 1960s and 1990s. If you are wondering why the British were so accomodating to these former POWs, it is the same in the US; there are several old buildings on US military bases that are considered historic because they once housed Italian POWs, and I have been told that for old soldiers to return, often with their families, was routine into the 1990s. The switch of Italy from enemy to key NATO ally – without the Nazi stain that hung over the Germans – changed those men into comrades, and much was done to make their returns pleasant.

What a remarkable thing to stand on this tiny island, a monument to human resilience, faith, and the peace that some enemies are able to make with each other.