Ismer Old Believers' Church

The construction of the church of the Ismer Old Believers' congregation on the shores of Lake Ismer began in 1912 according to a project approved in Vitebsk by Nikolay Sergeev, the city surveyor of Režica (Rēzekne) at that time. According to this project, local residents donated money, timber, and purchased other materials necessary for the work, and built the church within two years.

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The first Ismeri prayer house was built in 1862, but it was closed in 1887. In 1911, the project of the current prayer house, developed by the Rēzekne surveyor Nikolajs Sergejevs, was approved. The prayer house was built approximately where the old building was, in 1913–1914. The prayer house was consecrated in honor of the Sanctuary of the Mother of God and St. Nicholas. The church was built with donated funds, icons were also donated.

The church is a rectangular building, which includes a prayer room and anteroom with auxiliary rooms symmetrically located on both sides. The church has two towers. A polygonal bell tower rises above the ridge of the roof at the entrance to the building, and its three-tiered volume is closed by a domed roof with a cross. In the first third of the 20th century, the church had four bells, three of which were later removed. Currently, only one bell remains, which was made in Moscow, at the P. Finazhidsky factory, and was donated by the brothers Ivan and Pyotr Petrov. At the eastern end of the Ismeri church building, there is a small polygonal tower with a domed roof and a cross.

The prayer house of the Ismer Old Believer community is relatively richly decorated: the window frames at the top end with triangular-shaped lintels, supplemented with a row of carved wooden dentils. The pediment of the entrance part is divided into three parts with decorative, applied plank frames. A strip of openwork silhouette sawing is attached to the entrance pediment under the eaves, which is rarely found in the architecture of Old Believer churches in the Rēzekne district.

The small iconostasis has two rows of icons on the left side. In the center, four large icons, painted at the beginning of the 20th century (around 1912), were arranged in one row. Three of them were stolen in 2008, one in 2009 (some icons were found in Estonia in 2011). These icons made in Latgale with an unconventional iconographic solution are original examples of Latgale Old Believer icon painting of the beginning of the 20th century, characterized by the generalization of forms and the dryness of the pictorial language. Such an ensemble of large icons created simultaneously in Latgale Old Believer churches is considered a rarity.

The construction of the church of the Ismer Old Believers' congregation began on the shores of Lake Ismer in 1912 according to a plan approved in Vitebsk. People, donating money, timber, and purchasing other working materials, built the church themselves according to the project within two years. In 1914, prayers were already held in the church, the departed were taken out, and children were baptized. The Ismer congregation itself has existed since 1861.
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