Church of the Ascension, Kolomenskoye
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How it came to be
Kolomenskoye, an estate on the high bank of the Moskva River southeast of central Moscow, first appears in the will of Grand Prince Ivan Kalita in 1339. In 1532 Grand Prince Vasili III built the Church of the Ascension here to celebrate the birth of the future Tsar Ivan IV, 'the Terrible'. The church was consecrated on 3 September of that year in the presence of the grand prince and grand princess.
The church has the plan of a Greek cross and no apse. Above a high basement rise a cube and an octagon, crowned by an octagonal tent roof 20 m high. It is the first use of the traditional wooden tent roof on a stone building; the whole structure is 62 m tall, with walls 3 to 4 m thick. It strongly influenced later Russian church architecture.
In the 17th century Tsar Alexis built a great wooden palace of 250 rooms on the estate, which was demolished in 1768 on the orders of Catherine II. The church's first scientific restoration took place in 1914–16, and research in the 1980s guided a restoration that brought it closer to its original appearance. In the early Soviet period the restorer Pyotr Baranovsky moved wooden buildings from other regions to Kolomenskoye. The church was inscribed in 1994, and the Moscow government completed a reconstruction of the palace in 2010.
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