The first service in the new Protestant Chapel will be held on Sunday, September 28th, 1947. The new Chapel is situated in the north side of Hut D 5. The main entrance is on the west side of the Hut.

The new Chapel will be called the Chapel of St. Barbara, the Patron Saint of Artillerymen. The following information is gleaned from the encyclopaedia Britannica.

St. Barbara was the daughter of a heathen named Diosorus. He was a man who hated Christians and was most cruel to his daughter.

He kept her carefully guarded in a tower. While he was away on a journey, St. Barbara made a change in the plan of her bath house, which her Father was having built, she caused three windows to be put in, as a symbol of the Holy Trinity, instead of the two decreed by her father.

When her father returned she confessed to him that she was a Christian. This infuriated her Father and he dragged her to the Prefect of the Province, who condemned her to be tortured and beheaded, Diosorus himself carryied out the brutal sentence.

On his way home, after carrying out the sentence, he was struck by lightening. Probably for this reason St. Barbara was regarded as the Patron Saint in thunderstorms and as the Protectoress of Artillerymen and Miners.

She is represented in art as standing by a tower with three windows, sometimes with cannon nearby.

The place of her martyrdom is variously given as Heliopolis, as a Town in Tuscany, and as Nicomedia, Bithynia in about 235 AD. Her Festival Day is December 4th.

The zig-zag on the Artillery tie is emblematic of the lightening which struck St. Barbara’s Father.

Shilo Observer Sept. 26, 1947