Arnau Church

After 1945, when the Kaliningrad region became part of the Soviet Union, the church was used for grain storage.

[1] In 2003 a restoration campaign was launched,[2] with the church building then belonging to the Kaliningrad History Museum, which used it for exhibitions and orthodox liturgy.

Prof. Dr. Nicole Riedl, a restoration expert in medieval wall paintings at Hawk University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hildesheim, described the frescoes as being "irretrievably lost" in a 2014 report prepared for the German-based Kuratorium Arnau, an organization created in 1992 to conserve the church and its frescoes.

As a result of the report, the Kaliningrad Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church cut off relations with Kuratorium Arnau.

Riedl later said to The Art Newspaper that only 2-3% of the frescoes now survived, and that the Russian Orthodox Church had "deliberately destroyed" the rest.