Kim Il-Sung had a church rebuilt there shortly before he died. Likely this was for propaganda purposes. But he also allowed Billy Graham to preach to some NK military officers. (They sat in stoney silence, probably not having been informed as to how they were to react; and Graham had to read from a script which an NK handler observed over his shoulder. But he was allowed to preach.)
Kim’s mother was a Christian and he knew Christian hymn tunes.
He had ordered the railroad to the South repaired so that he could make
a journey to the South; and was supposedly preparing to remove Kim Jung-Il as his successor in favor of another son.
Then (abruptly?) he died. He was old enough to have died of natural causes; but one wonders...
“Natural causes” in such a society encompasses a wider range of deaths than in civilized nations. A bullet in the head is a natural cause in a hard Communist society.
In Pyongyang under Soviet occupation, both the Soviet-installed regime and its opponents reflected the recent American Christian presence. Kim Il Sung was a son of Christian parents, his father a Presbyterian from a rural area near Pyongyang who had attended middle school at Union Christian College, his mother a daughter of a Presbyterian minister. He renounced the religion of his parents and embraced Communism, returning to Korea as a 33 year old junior officer in the Red Army.
And Kim created the state religion in an attempt to declare himself a replacement for Christianity.
Been tried hundreds of times in history with the same results - a tomb that holds the remains of the founder.