An Italian Chapel may be a rather strange thing to come across on the remote Scottish island of Lamb Holm, but one has been standing there since the 1940s.
The chapel was built by Italian prisoners of war during the WWII, as the Catholic prisoners decided they needed a place to worship. This tale begins in 1939, when a German submarine entered the Scapa Flow, the area of water surrounding the Orkney Islands, and sank the British ship HMS Royal Oak, causing the deaths of 834 British soldiers.
Following this attack, it was decided that entrances to Scapa Flow would be closed off by barriers, to ensure the safety of British ships. In order to build these barriers, 550 Italian prisoners of war were transported from Africa, where they had been fighting, to Orkney.
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These men were then separated into two camps, Camp 60, and Camp 34. In 1943, Major Thomas Pyres Buckland, Camp 60's new commander, and the camp's Catholic priest Father Gioacchino Giacobazzi, decided to construct a place of worship for the prisoners still on the island.
Those at Camp 60 had limited materials when it came to constructing their chapel, and the structure began as two Nissen huts, steel structures usually used as military barracks, joined together. The interior was then covered with plasterboard and the altar and altar rail were constructed from concrete, that was left over following the construction of the barriers.
Much of the interior decorating was then done by Domenico Chiocchetti, a prisoner of Moena, who based the altar painting on the image from a prayer card his mother had given him prior to the outbreak of war.
The exterior was created by several other prisoners who were able to conceal the shape of the Nissen huts and create a facade that looked like any other small church using some more of the leftover concrete.
Other materials were used to furnish the chapel, including corned beef tins which were turned into candle holders, while the baptismal font was made from a car exhaust.
The prisoners were released just before the end of the war in 1945, although Domenico remained behind to continue work on the chapel, which still stands today. The chapel is open daily for visitors between 10am and 4pm.