The Troitsky Monastery

The famous monastery of Troitskaya-Sergeeva or, to use its full name, the Laurel of St. Sergius under the Blessing of the Holy Trinity, was about forty-five miles northeast of Moscow on the Great Russian Road, which leads from the capital to Great Rostov and then to Yaroslavl on the Volga.  The origins of this hallowed and historic place lay in the fourteenth century, when it became the site of a small wooden church and monastery founded by a monk named Sergius, who blessed Russian armies before the great Battle of Kulikovo, against the Tatars.  When the Russians won, the monastery became a national shrine.  In the sixteenth century, Troitsky became rich and powerful.  Dying tsars and noblemen, in hopes of salvation, bequeathed their wealth to the monastery, and its treasure vaults were choked with gold, silver, pearls, and jewels.  Huge white walls, from thirty to fifty feet high and twenty feet thick, circled the monastery for a mile in circumference, making it impregnable.  From the ramparts and from the immense round towers which stood at the corners, the muzzles of scores of brass cannon looked out on the countryside.  In 1608 and 1609, during the Time of Troubles, the Troitsky withstood a siege by 30,000 Poles, whose cannonballs simply bounced off the monastery’s massive walls.

[the footnote] Today, the monastery is commonly called Zagorsk, after the industrial town that now spreads beneath its walls.  An oasis of religious life in Soviet Russia, it is, as it has been for centuries, an attraction for pilgrims from all over Russia.  As one of the richest assemblages of religious architecture to be found in the Soviet Union, it has also become a regular stop for most foreign tourists who visit Moscow.  Happily, even now [1980], Troitsky still exudes something of the beauty, the grandeur, and the holiness of its past.

From: Peter the Great: His Life and World by Robert K. Massie; paperback edition (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986), pp. 101-102.  Originally published in 1980.

 

A Picture of 17th-Century Russian Orthodoxy

In normal times, the Kremlin had two masters, one temporal, the other spiritual: the tsar and the patriarch.  Each lived within the fortress and governed his respective realm from there.  Crowding around the Kremlin squares were government offices, law courts, barracks, bakeries, laundries, and stables.  Nearby stood other palaces and offices and more than forty churches and chapels of the patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church.  At the center of the Kremlin, at the crest of the hill around the edges of a wide square, stood four magnificent buildings – three superb cathedrals and a majestic, soaring bell tower – which, then and now, may be considered the physical heart of Russia.  Two of these cathedrals, along with the Kremlin wall and many of its towers, had been designed by Italian architects.

The largest and most historic of these cathedrals was the Assumption Cathedral (Uspensky Sobor), in which every Russian tsar or empress, from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, was crowned.  It had been built in 1479 by Ridolfo Fioravanti of Bologna, but reflected many essential Russian features of church design.  Before beginning its construction, Fioravanti had visited the old Russian cities of Vladimir, Yaroslavl, Rostov, and Novgorod to study their beautiful cathedrals, and then produced a Russian church with far more space inside than any Russian had ever seen.  Four huge circular columns supported the onion-shaped central dome and its four smaller satellite domes without the complicated webbing of walls and buttressing previously thought necessary.  This gave an airiness to the ceiling and a spaciousness to the nave entirely unique in Russia, where the power as well as the beauty of the Gothic arch were unknown.

Across the square from the Assumption Cathedral stood the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael, where the tsars were entombed.  Built by Alvesio Novy of Milan, it was considerably more Italianate than either of its two sisters.  Inside, amid its several chapels, the deceased rulers were clustered.  In the middle of one small room, three carved stone coffins held Ivan the Terrible and his two sons.  Other tsars lay in rows along the walls, their coffins of brass and stone covered with embroidered velvet cloths with inscriptions sewn in pearls around the hems.  Tsar Alexis, father of Peter the Great, and two of his sons, Fedor and Ivan VI, also both tsars, would lie in this small room, but they would be the last.  Alexis’ third son, Peter, would build a new cathedral in a new city on the Baltic where he, and all the Romanovs who followed, would be entombed.

The smallest of the three cathedrals, the Cathedral of the Annunciation, had nine towers and three porches, and was the only one designed by Russian architects.  Its builders came from Pskov, which was famous for its carved stone churches.  Used extensively as a private chapel by the tsars and their families, its iconostasis was set with icons by the two most famous painters of this form of religious art in Russia, Theophanes the Greek, who came from Byzantium, and his Russian pupil, Andrei Rublev.

From: Peter the Great: His Life and World by Robert K. Massie; paperback printing (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986), pp. 6-7.  The original hardback edition was published in 1980.  The quotation is part of a description of Moscow, Russia, at it looked in the 1670s.

Robert K. Massie (born in 1929) is a trained historian (with degrees from Yale and Oxford universities) who has written several outstanding histories.  Peter the Great: His Life and World was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.  Now 82, his most recent book is a biography of Catherine the Great.