~7h — the round trip from the gangway, with the 60-minute margin kept aside.
Tap a photo to see it large. 6 photographs, each credited.
A brick church of 1902 on an island settled by families who hid their Christianity for 250 years and came out of hiding in the 1860s. It is World Heritage, access is managed, and almost nobody goes.
Two hundred and fifty years of hiding, and then a brick church built by hand
Kuroshima is an island where about 80 percent of the population is Catholic, descended from hidden Christians who survived 250 years of prohibition. The 1902 brick church was built by the villagers themselves, who funded it by selling their own rice. It is part of the UNESCO listing for Japan's hidden Christian sites.
Christianity was banned in Japan in 1614 and the penalty was death. On small islands off this coast, families kept practising in secret for two hundred and fifty years, without priests, disguising prayers as Buddhist chants. When the ban lifted they came out — and on Kuroshima they built a church out of forty thousand bricks they made themselves.
And convert large numbers in Kyushu
The penalty is death; fumi-e are used to find believers
Islands are watched less closely
Some communities rejoin the Church; some do not
Give advance notice before you go. It is a working parish church, not a monument, and the community asks.
Both pins on one map, so the distance is a fact rather than a feeling.
Counted from the moment you step off the gangway. The hour before all-aboard is not in this bar; it is already set aside.
50 minutes each way is the honest figure for ferry ~50 min, not the optimistic one. If your ship is late, cut the 5 hr 20 min in the middle. Never cut the hour at the end.
Each of these still lands you back aboard with the hour to spare.
See · ~3hA drowned coastline of 208 wooded islets — the name means ninety-nine and undercounts by half.
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Eat · ~1.25hNot a recipe — a rule.
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See · ~2.5hThe classic view over the islands, from a headland the city planted with 150,000 cosmos for autumn and rape flowers for spring.
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