The Cathedral of Christ the Savior is the most important churches in the city because this is where the Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow celebrates mass. As you can see, the building is truly enormous. With its towering height of 104 meters, it is the tallest Christian temple of the Orthodox rite in the world and can hold 10,000 people.
However, the building you see before you was actually built in 2000, a reconstructed copy of the original church that was blown up on December 5, 1931 by Stalin, who in its place wanted to build a monument to socialism, called the Palace of the Soviets, which was never completed.
The original church was commissioned by Tsar Alexander I to celebrate the victory against Napoleon and to thank divine providence for saving the empire. The work did not begin immediately though; in fact, construction only began in 1839, 27 years after the end of the war and after lots of second thoughts.
It was Tsar Nicholas I who appointed his trusted architect, Konstantin Thon, to design a project for the cathedral, based on the church of St. Sophia in Constantinople.
The construction of the cathedral took many years, the exterior was completed in 1860 and the decoration of the interior continued for another twenty years after that, so the cathedral was only consecrated on May 26, 1883, the day of Alexander III’s coronation.
The cathedral that stands before you today, as well as in its external structure, replicates the original one in many respects: the central altar is dedicated to the Nativity, and the two sides are dedicated to Saints Nicholas and Alexander Nevsky. The frescoes around the main gallery depict scenes from the war against Napoleon, and the marble tombstones commemorate those who fought.
The reconstructed cathedral includes a smaller, but no less impressive, lower church that you can’t see from the outside, dedicated to the Transfiguration. This is where you’ll find the icon entitled "Christ not created by hand" by Sorokin, which miraculously survived the destruction of the original cathedral.
Let me leave you with an interesting fact: The body of the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, who died on April 23, 2007, rested here before being buried in the Novodevichy cemetery.
Language: English