Lakeside Church

St Faith's, Ohinemutu, Rotorua. 2007 Ajr

This is the very beautiful St Faith’s Anglican Church, built in 1910 in an elaborate Tudor style and embellished with ornate Maori carvings. It sits beside Lake Rotorua in the little Maori village of Ohinemutu, once the main Maori settlement of the area and where Rotorua was born as a tourist town in the 19th century. I love this place with its hissing steaming vents, little puffs of geothermal steam gushing out of the ground, the pavements, the gutters – just wherever it bursts free. Maori in fact, still use geothermal pools in the area for cooking, washing and bathing. But back to St Faith’s – inside there’s an amazing sand-blasted window that depicts a Maori Christ, who appears to walk on the waters of Lake Rotorua seen through the window. The village is also home to the spectacularly carved Tamatekapua meeting house, which I featured here in February. (Just put Ohinemutu into the blog search box top left, or click on Ohinemutu in the label line below).