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Location: Nikolskaya ulitsa 3
Tel. (495) 698 2726
Subway:
Okhotnyy Ryad
Open: 8am- 8pm daily
The Cathedral of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God on Red Square (Kazansky Cathedral) is an Orthodox church in Moscow, located in front of the Mint on the corner of Red Square and Nikolskaya Street. It was built in the 1630s. It was demolished in 1936 during the Stalinist reconstruction of the Manezhnaya Square area. Restored in 1990-1993 by architects Oleg Zhurin and Gennady Mokeev.
The wooden Kazan Cathedral was built at the expense of military
commander Dmitry Pozharsky in memory of Russia's victory in the Battle
of Moscow in 1612. It was erected on the site of the former building of
the trading rows, however, there was a market near the fence of the
temple for a long time. The Kazan Icon of the Mother of God, the main
military shrine of the Second People's Militia, was placed in the
cathedral. It was delivered by Pozharsky from the Vvedenskaya Church on
Lubyanka. The cathedral was consecrated by Patriarch Filaret in October
1625. From the moment of its opening until 1765, religious processions
were organized to the cathedral: on the day the icon was found in Kazan
- on July 8, and on the day of the capture of Kitai-Gorod - on October
22.
After a fire in 1630, the cathedral was built in stone under
the guidance of the architect Abrosim Maksimov. According to another
version, masters Semyon Glebov and Naum Petrov supervised the work. The
cathedral was a pillarless quadrangle with two aisles. The top of the
building was covered by a five-tiered pyramid of kokoshniks. The main
throne was consecrated in 1636 in the presence of Tsar Mikhail
Fedorovich and Patriarch Joasaph, and the northern chapel of Averky of
Hierapolis was consecrated in the autumn of 1637. The models for the
construction were the Small Cathedral of the Donskoy Monastery and the
Church of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos in Rubtsovo. The
new temple had one apse, the wall was divided into sections, in which
there were windows. Ten years later, to the right of the main church,
the chapel of the holy Kazan wonderworkers Gury and Varsonofy was
consecrated, dismantled at the end of the 18th century during the
expansion of Nikolskaya Street. By 1650, a porch and a hipped bell tower
were built in front of the cathedral. The latter was probably attached
to the quadrangle from the northwestern side, as was customary in church
architecture of the early 17th century. At the end of the same century,
a front porch was built, crowned with a cupola, and a fence made of
stone pillars with wooden bars was erected.
In the middle of the
17th century, archpriest John Neronov, who did not accept the church
reform of Patriarch Nikon, served in the Kazan Cathedral, and after him
Avvakum Petrov. In the temple, they were arrested and sent to prison.
In the 1730s, the roofs of the cathedral were horizontally covered
with two strips. Later, the temple received a four-pitched roof. At the
same time, lucarnes were made on the head of the temple, building on it
with a decorative drum with an onion dome. In the late 1760s, the temple
complex was rebuilt at the expense of Princess Maria Alexandrovna
Dolgorukova, the dilapidated chapel of Saints Guriy and Barsanuphius was
dismantled. At the end of the 18th century, the nearby shopping malls
were rebuilt, after which they blocked the view of the cathedral from
Red Square. The lower tier of the bell tower was lined with benches.
In 1801, by the resolution of Metropolitan Platon, the cathedral
lost its hipped bell tower. A new two-tiered quadrangular building was
built four years later in the style of classicism. It was installed in
the center of the western facade above the entrance to the porch.
In the autumn of 1812, during the Patriotic War, a prayer service
was served before the list of the Kazan icon in the Kazan Cathedral for
the salvation of the Russian Empire, which was attended by commander
Mikhail Kutuzov. Before the occupation of Moscow by the French, the
Kazan Icon was hidden in the house of Archpriest Moshkov. During the
occupation of the city, the altar of the cathedral was turned into a
stable. According to Alexander Shakhovsky, “a dead horse was dragged
into the altar of the Kazan Cathedral and put in place of the discarded
throne.” By February 1813, the cathedral had been re-consecrated, and by
1816 had been mostly repaired after war damage.
In August 1824,
the clergy of the cathedral appealed to Archbishop Filaret with a
request to convert the dilapidated Averkievsky chapel into a vestry,
since divine services were not held there. However, according to his
decree, repairs were made in the extension and prayers were resumed.
In 1849 a new silver temple iconostasis was created. In 1865, a
third tier was built on the bell tower, at the same time the facades of
the cathedral were redone according to the project of the architect
Nikolai Kozlovsky, and in 1873 the walls were repainted. Rector A.F.
Nekrasov noted that after the renovation, the temple lost its
uniqueness:
Visitors express sorrow for the external squalor of the
house of Our Lady. Vladyka Metropolitan Leonty, on his first visit to
the Kazan Cathedral, with his characteristic simplicity and directness,
said to me: “Well, what kind of cathedral is this? This is a simple
country church!” And fair.
Under the new government, on July 8
(21), 1918, Patriarch Tikhon delivered a sermon on the execution of
Nicholas II during a divine service. In September of the same year, its
main shrine was stolen from the cathedral - a list from the icon of Our
Lady of Kazan, revered as miraculous.
In 1925, at the expense of the Renovation parish,
the restoration of the cathedral began under the leadership of Peter
Baranovsky, during which the building was planned to return to its
original appearance. The work was carried out without scaffolding
and started from the roof. Baranovsky uncovered the remains of the
ancient decor under the layers of plaster and found out that the
monument of the 17th century was actually completely preserved under
the later layers. In details, the accuracy of the reconstruction
carried out is disputed, which is caused by a lack of documentary
material: for example, the hipped bell tower demolished in 1802
looks different in all the surviving images. By 1929, the ancient
kokoshniks and the alleged wall decor had been recreated.
The
restoration had not yet touched the top and the bell tower, when the
Moscow City Council decided to demolish the temple. Religious
buildings did not correspond to the new purpose of Red Square as a
venue for solemn ceremonies of the socialist secular state. The bell
tower was demolished in 1929, the cathedral - in 1936, at the height
of the Stalinist reconstruction of the Manezhnaya Square area.
Baranovsky, who returned from exile before dismantling, managed to
make measurements and photographic fixation of the temple. Before
the demolition, the cathedral housed a warehouse of marble belonging
to Metrostroy, which was used to finish the subway under
construction.
A year later, on the site of the temple, a
pavilion in honor of the Third International was built according to
the project of the architect Boris Iofan. In 1937, the Moscow City
Council decided to build summer cafes on the site of the demolished
temples. One of them was built on the corner of Red Square with
Nikolskaya Street - a high podium was built, which partially
included the remains of the basement, which was finished with
marble. Two open porticos were erected on it, and a fountain was
installed between them according to the project of architects L. I.
Savelyev and Oswald Stapran.
In 1990, at the initiative of the Moscow city branch
of the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural
Monuments, the reconstruction of the cathedral began. The project was
developed by architects Gennady Mokeev and Oleg Igorevich Zhurin, to
whom Baranovsky gave measurements and other materials on the Kazan
Cathedral. After the issuance of a decree on the restoration of the
"monument of military glory", the collection of donations began. For
this, a temporary wooden chapel and a box for collecting money were
installed opposite the entrance to GUM from Nikolskaya Street. However,
most of the funds were provided by the Moscow government. As Zhurin
recalls, the construction was hindered by the community of the future
temple:
From the first days of work on the project, this Community
constantly interfered with its implementation. They sought to delay the
construction so that the flow of donations, which they used for their
own needs, would not dry up. As a result, they broke the walls of the
room where I worked on the project, survived me and the architects who
helped me from the workshop, disrupted the start of construction work,
wrote endless slander to various authorities, being complete ignoramuses
in the field of construction and restoration work, put forward the most
ridiculous demands
In 1991, a cross was solemnly consecrated on
the foundations of the main altar and a foundation plate was installed.
The temple was recreated in three years, having been consecrated in
November 1993. It was restored in the forms of the middle of the 17th
century: with two aisles, a gallery, a tent and an open wide porch.
There are no photographs of pre-revolutionary murals, but the historian
Sergei Alekseevich Smirnov managed to establish the themes of the
murals. Based on his research, artists from Palekh and Bryansk in the
1990s painted the temple in a retrospective, canonical manner. The
renewed cathedral was consecrated by Patriarch Alexy II on November 4 -
the day of the celebration of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God and in
memory of the deliverance of Moscow and Russia from the Poles in 1612.
It became the first of the churches in Moscow lost during the Soviet
era, which was recreated in its original forms.
The Kazan Cathedral is a typical for the first half of
the 17th century, a type of a square, pillarless, single-domed temple
with a hill of kokoshniks, which goes back to the old cathedral of the
Donskoy Monastery. Among the buildings of the Moscow Posad, this type
included the Church of St. Nicholas the Apparition on the Arbat. The
cathedral is surrounded on three sides by open galleries that lead to
the hipped bell tower at the northwestern corner and to the northeastern
chapel of Averky of Hierapolis
Rows of energetically profiled keeled
kokoshniks, deep panels on the shoulder blades of the quadrangle, and
triangular architraves, for all their simplicity, create an exceptional
plastic effect. The well-founded proportions of the head drum, the
skilful arrangement of the kokoshniks “in a dash” contribute to the
composure and integrity of the multi-volume architectural composition.
According to Pavel Rappoport, in the arrangement and combination of
large kokoshniks with small ones, the desire of Russian architects to
enrich the bright, major composition with more fractional details was
manifested - a harbinger of the onset of the era of “patterned.