Faith, work and mercy. The story of Mother Feodosia.

I remember that first shot — the church in Bulzi, half-ruined, with collapsed domes, like a blind old man, stretching out his wounded hands to the sky. And in the midst of this desolation — she, Mother Feodosia, former Olga Novgorodtseva, a major of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, and now a nun, whose life has become a bridge between the world and eternity.

My project began in 2012, but its roots go deeper — to those troubled nineties, when I, a twenty-year-old youth, sought in faith not consolation, but revelation. I was baptized then not for opportunistic reasons, but out of a thirst for light, the very same thing that I later tried to capture in my works. And so, years later, fate brought me to Mother Feodosia, a woman whose path from the press secretary of the rescue department to a monastic cell seemed to me at first a paradox, and then a miracle.

She told me about her search, about how Valaam became her spiritual homeland, how Bishop Job, in spite of everything, tonsured her a nun, leaving her in the world. Her story is not the life of a saint, but the confession of a living person who, like me, sought God not in dogmas, but in the silence of her own heart.

I photographed her at work - with a pick in her hands, among a pile of bricks, surrounded by volunteers who came from the cities to help restore the temple. Her face, cut with wrinkles, like old parchment, glowed with that very "Kuindzhi light bulb" that I thought about so often. It wasn't just light - it was a reflection of the inner work she had done to transform herself from a major in the Ministry of Emergency Situations into Mother Feodosia.

But what is faith for me, a photographer? It's not a ritual, not a rite, but a mystery captured in an instant. Like that day when we were cleaning the church: the snow was melting under our feet, the sun was breaking through the holes in the roof, and Mother, kneeling, was scraping dirt out of the corners, as if cleaning out the sins of the whole world. I was photographing her then - and in the frame there was not only her face, but also shadows of the past and reflections of the future.

Her monastic community with four women seemed to me either an outpost of civilization, or its last refuge. They lived a difficult, modest life, but in their eyes there was that very "long-suffering love" that the Apostle Paul wrote about. And when my mother said: "In the world - by justice, and in the church - by love," I understood that these were not beautiful words, but her life, her cross.

My photo project is not a report or a document. It is an attempt to capture what is hidden behind the external: the light that breaks through the cracks in the walls of the temple and in human souls. As Nabokov wrote, "truth is what can be told only by hiding behind a metaphor." So it is here: each photograph is a metaphor, a parable, a question without an answer.

What will remain after us? The destroyed temple that we restored? Or something more - that very "narrow path" that my mother spoke of? I do not know. But when I look at these shots, it seems to me that somewhere there, between the light and the shadow, there is an answer.