Castlegar - Doukhobor Discovery Centre (formerly Doukhobor Historic Village)

Doukhobor Historic Village near the Castlegar airport off Highway 3 provides an insight into the way of life of the Russian Doukhobors who emigrated here around the turn of the century and lived here from 1908 until the 1930s. Typical of the settlements of the "Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood", as they called themselves, were their brick-built communal houses surrounded by working quarters. The nearby "Doukhobor Restaurant" specializes in Russian food.

Difficulties with their Canadian neighbors arose mainly with the members of a fanatical Doukhobor sect who settled in Krestova, the "Sons of Freedom" who - like almost all Doukhobors - refused to register births and deaths and rejected the state educational system as being an intrusion into their pacifist and secluded ways. They set fire to schools and protested naked in the streets against government ordinances. Time and again they threw home-made bombs on the grave in Robson Rd/Highway 3 of the founder of the settlement, Pjotr Verigin, who was killed in 1926 during an attack on a train. Today all has quieted down and most of the Doukhobors have become farmers and adjusted to the Canadian way of life. Only a few of the typical Doukhobor villages are still inhabited.