Church of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin in Yasenevo, Russia
A group of mostly volunteers
and amateurs, working with small donations, built a church to rival
any monument in the history of Christendom. The project was consecrated by His Holiness, Patriarch Kirill, on December 27, 2015.
In 2001, the Optina Monastery initiated a project to build a
representation church in Moscow. Over time, however, the project outgrew
this basic program. A hilltop site was located in Yasenevo, a district
far to the south-west of the city center. It is the highest ground
around Moscow, and many felt that the land had a providential destiny to
hold a great church.
Archimandrite Melchisidek (Artyukhin) was
appointed to direct the building project. It took seven years to acquire
the land and the necessary permissions from the government. In the meantime, it was decided to name the church for the
Protection of the Mother of God, for the church, overlooking the whole
capital city, would represent the Holy Virgin’s protection of Moscow.
The project naturally took on the related theme of a war memorial,
commemorating the military protection of the capital, and they made
plans to ring the foundation with great stone crosses memorializing the
many battles through history in which the city was threatened and
preserved. The armed forces of Russia were moved by this gesture, and
many contributions came from individual soldiers.
A third program emerged when Archimandrite Melchisidek noticed that
the arches drawn by the architect in the crypt level closely resembled
the Grotto of the Nativity in Bethlehem. He had the idea to recreate
this holy site in the basement of his church, and in time this idea grew
also. In the end, they built full-scale replicas of all the great
pilgrimage sites of the Holy Land beneath the Yasenevo church – a
miniature pilgrimage destination in itself, in the same tradition as the
New Jerusalem Monastery built outside Moscow in the seventeenth
century. These replicas are remarkable feats of sculpture, copying even
the cracks and chips in the original stone slabs.
But most astonishing by far was the project to decorate the interior
of the main church. It is ornamented in the style of the Sicilian
Cathedrals of the 12th
century, without doubt the most sumptuous and refined style that ever
emerged in the Byzantine-influenced world. Virtually the entire inside
of the Yasenevo church is mosaic iconography in glittering glass and
gold. There have been but a handful of churches decorated like this in
all of history, and this church ranks fifth among them in area of
mosaics. The lower walls of the church are revetted in white marble and
the floor is finished in splendid Cosmatesque marble and mosaic
interlace. The church is lit with a great brass choros and a
constellation of glittering chandeliers. The marble iconostasis bears
jewel-like icons with a powerful Romanesque gravity. It is a vision of
medieval splendor the likes of which have never before been seen in
Russia, and only rarely in all the world.
The true miracle of the Yasenevo church, though, lies not in its
richness, but its poverty. Astonishingly, this church, constructed in
just seven years, had no major individual donors. There was no great
oligarch or wealthy institution footing the bill. Rather, the money came
in small donations from ordinary people and pious organizations –
800,000 donors in total.
Likewise, the astonishing mosaic work was not the work of a
professional studio, but of students and amateurs, all volunteers. There
was one professional iconographer hired to draw the great Pantocrator,
but beyond that, the work was planned by highly-capable art students.
They could not afford to buy Italian tesserae for the vast areas of
gold, so they asked for donations of gold jewelry from across Russia,
and developed their own technique for depositing the gold onto ceramic
tile fragments. The mosaic workshop was run by a retired master who
taught anyone who showed up. In total there were at least 225 of
these volunteer mosaicists, some of whom arrived with no skills, but
only a life-long dream of making an icon, and ended up creating works of
incredible beauty.
Almost everything was built like this
– the landscaping, the marble work, the unexpected and charming
decorations that are seen virtually everywhere. The
construction site had the feelinbg of a liturgy – the workers felt their
priestly role in this work. Everyone involved in the project recognized
that a miracle was taking place – that God had ordained that this
project was to be different from any other – that this church would be
built only with love, and that it would outshine all others.
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