Patriarch's Palace and Twelve Apostles Church

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The former patriarch's palace with domes of the Twelve Apostles Church
Location in the Kremlin

The Patriarch's Palace and the Twelve Apostles Church ( Russian Патриарший дворец и церковь Двенадцати апостолов ) is an architecturally cohesive combination of a profane and a sacred building in the Russian capital Moscow . The palace with the attached church is located in the Moscow Kremlin on Cathedral Square, immediately adjacent to the Assumption Cathedral and the Church of the Deposition of the Robe . Until the 18th century it served as a living and working residence and house church of the Moscow Patriarch . Today the building houses a museum with a wide range of utensils from the Russian Orthodox Church and everyday objects from the 16th and 17th centuries.

Historical background

The first residential residence of the Russian Orthodox head of the church on the territory of the Moscow Kremlin was built in 1325, at the time when Moscow was ruled by Grand Duke Ivan I (Kalita) and a few years before the fortress was rebuilt on his instructions. The then Metropolitan Peter settled near the Dormition Cathedral, more precisely its predecessor building, which was built at the same time (1326-27), and thus marked the beginning of the history of the Kremlin as the center of the spiritual life of Moscow. As usual, the original rooms were made of wood. The first mention of stone metropolitan chambers in the Kremlin dates back to 1450, although this building apparently did not last long either. Until the late 16th century, when the title of patriarch was first introduced in the Russian Orthodox Church , several subsequent buildings, like other houses and churches in the Kremlin, fell victim to frequent fires and had to be rebuilt again and again.

View of the Twelve Apostles Church from the north

The rooms that are preserved today were only built under the patriarch Nikon , who wanted to have a particularly representative palace built for his office in order to underline the importance of the Orthodox faith. For this purpose, Nikon received from the then Tsar Alexei I, in addition to the already existing patriarchal house, an adjoining plot of land north of the Assumption Cathedral. The old rooms were demolished and the present palace was built on the entire property. The construction, which lasted from 1653 to 1656, was directed by the Russian architects Antip Konstantinow and Baschen Ogurzow, who two decades earlier had also been allowed to build the Terem Palace for the tsarist family.

Painting by Eduard Gaertner

The new building not only surpassed the old rooms in its architecture and furnishings, but also represented a novel combination of a residential building and a church building. When viewed from the cathedral square, the left half of the building represented the profane part, where living, working and reception rooms of the patriarch, while the right half - recognizable by the roof section closed by five church towers - housed the patriarch's house church. Originally Nikon had this church consecrated to the Apostle Philip , only under one of Nikon's successors - the Patriarch Joachim - was the church consecrated to the Orthodox Feast of the Twelve Apostles and received its current name. In the lower part of the church half there was a through portal that has been preserved to this day and led from the street into the patriarchal courtyard.

The palace served as the apartments of the Moscow Patriarch until 1721, when the patriarchy in the Russian Orthodox Church was abolished and the church council was taken over by the Holy Synod . The latter set up one of their service rooms in the former patriarch's palace shortly afterwards. The former parade reception room of the patriarch - the so-called Kreuzkammer - was set up from 1763 for the annual ceremony of the anointing oil production; However, large parts of the interior of the palace served as a public museum of everyday Russian church life in the 17th century.

With the entry of the Bolshevik government into the Kremlin shortly after the October Revolution of 1917, both the former patriarchal residence and the church were closed by state power. After the entire Kremlin was closed to public access in the 1920s, the patriarchal chambers were also increasingly forgotten. Only with the reopening of the Kremlin in 1955 and the establishment of many historical buildings and churches as museums was the former patriarch's palace restored and also opened to visitors. It still fulfills its main function as a museum today. Many of the exhibits here come from other Kremlin buildings, including those that were destroyed in the 1920s and 1930s at the behest of the Soviet government.

Interiors and exposure

Patriarch's Palace

At the time when the building served as the patriarch's residence, the patriarch's private apartments - including the bedroom and prayer room - were all on the second floor of the left half of the building. The first floor, which now houses the exhibition of the museum, served as a parade area for receptions, audiences and meetings, while the first floor housed only commercial space and is therefore of no historical interest. When entering the palace via the visitor entrance, a staircase leads directly to the exposition on the first floor.

Cross chamber. Former anointing furnace
Anointing oil boiler

The central part of the museum is the former room for ceremonial receptions known as the Kreuzkammer ( Крестовая палата ). This is an approximately 280 m² hall whose modeled after the original state device has an extremely splendid shape and in some manner to the Parade hall of the nearby facet palace recalls. The cross vault of the hall has no additional supports in the form of columns or pillars and is painted throughout with plant ornaments. The hall served the patriarch as a place for receptions, church conferences, tsar audiences and other particularly important acts. Richly decorated door portals lead from the Kreuzkammer to neighboring exhibition rooms, which in the 17th century also served primarily representative purposes, including the refectory or the former work cabinet of the patriarch.

One of the most famous exhibits in the Kreuzkammer is the former oven in which, from 1763 to the beginning of the 20th century, every three to four years, always in the fasting week before Orthodox Easter , anointing oil ( chrism ) for church rituals such as baptism or anointing ( the latter, for example, accepted Russian tsars at their coronation ceremonies ). It was the only place in all of Russia where this process took place: The finished anointing oil was distributed from here to Orthodox churches throughout Russia and also in Orthodox countries (such as Bulgaria or Serbia ). This tradition has continued in the Russian Orthodox Church to this day, although the oil is no longer produced in the Kremlin, but in the Moscow Donskoy Monastery . In addition to the old furnace, the richly ornamented frame with its icons, there are historical, also very artfully made kettles for storing the anointing oil. They were all donated to the Patriarch's Palace by Tsarina Catherine II (the Great) .

Also in the Kreuzkammer and in the adjacent refectory, which is located at the far end of the left part of the building, a large number of original items from the household of the former Patriarch's Palace and the Tsar's Court are on display. On display are particularly representative pieces of crockery, some of which are made of precious metals, various unique pieces of watchmaking, magnificent pieces of clothing or icon frames and other exhibits from the 17th and 18th centuries. In the former study of the patriarch, the interior of the 17th century was recreated, but no original furniture from the patriarch's palace of that time has been preserved.

Twelve Apostles Church

The Twelve Apostles Church is now also part of the museum in the former Patriarch's Palace, but the original furnishings from the 17th century have largely not been preserved here: many of the historically valuable items that have been preserved were moved to the 20th century The Kremlin Armory Moved, where some of it is on display to this day. This also applies to items from the former sacristy of the Patriarch's Palace - including parade robes and mitres from Moscow patriarchs - which can also be seen in the armory today. The five-tier iconostasis , richly decorated with carved ornaments, which is now in the Twelve Apostles Church, was transferred here in 1929 from the Ascension Monastery, one of the two monasteries of the Kremlin destroyed by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s. The two dozen icons that hang on the walls of the church - some of them are works by well-known master icon painters such as Simon Ushakov - originally come from other places of worship.

In the early 1990s, the Twelve Apostles Church, like the other larger churches in the Kremlin, was returned to the Moscow Patriarchate. Once a year, on the Feast of the Twelve Apostles on July 13, services are held here.

See also

literature

  • AJKiselëv (Ed.): Moskva. Kremlin i Krasnaya Ploščadʹ . AST / Astrel, Moscow 2006, ISBN 5-17034-875-4 , pp. 137-147

Web links

Commons : Patriarchal Palace and Twelve Apostles Church  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 55 ° 45 ′ 4.9 ″  N , 37 ° 37 ′ 2.1 ″  E