MOSCOW: Russian and Israeli businessmen claiming the support of Christian, Muslim and Jewish spiritual leaders plan to build an ecumenical theme park in Moscow called "Bibleland", recreating the main sites of the Holy Land.
The park, costing up to $60 million to build, will offer 1:10 scale reproductions of the best-known sites of Biblical Palestine "but with a predominance of Christian monuments, as Russia is a majority Orthodox country," the director of Holyland Exhibition, Emile Pagis, told reporters Wednesday.
The attraction, which will occupy around 80 acres (32 hectares), will open in 2005, said Pagis, a Russian-born Israeli who has accumulated a personal fortune through the sale in Russia of souvenirs of the Biblical sites in modern Israel.
The attractions of "Bibleland" will include religion-based games for children and include water-courses symbolising the Red Sea, the Dead Sea and the river Jordan.
"This will be a way of helping children to understand the sacred texts of the Bible, the Koran and the New Testament, which will become the books of their lives," Pagis said, stressing that he did not wish to "contribute to friction among the religions" but rather to "promote peace among the faiths." The "Bibleland" project in northwestern Moscow would "contribute to a better world," he said.
The company's chairman Umar Djabrailov added that the theme park would "perhaps help us to become better people." Chechen-born Djabrailov, who has substantial interests in Moscow's hotel and gaming sector, has been accused in media reports of involvement in a murder attempt against Moscow's deputy mayor Yosif Ordzhonikidze last month.
He has was also questioned by police following the 1996 murder of US businessman Paul Tatum with whom he was in dispute over ownership of the luxury Radisson Slavyanskaya hotel.
He has dismissed all accusations of criminal activities or links to the mafia. The "Bibleland" theme park will include a restaurant, the "Jerusalem tavern", providing traditional food associated with each of the three faiths, and souvenir kiosks offering samples of Jordan water "from 15 rubles (50 US cents)."
Andrei Dementyev, a Soviet-era poet named head of the company's supervisory committee, denounced a description of the project by the Kommersant business daily as "commercial-atheist," asserting that "all our efforts are directed at achieving peace among the religions."