| |
A short distance from Kolomenskoye, further
down the river Moskva is the village of Diakovo where the church of Saint John
the Precursor, a fine example of a daring attempt to combine Byzantine
traditions with forms of wooden church architecture, was built in the fifteen
forties. The name of the builder is unknown, nor there are documents that state
who commissioned it, a rather surprising lack of information for a monument
which, according to some historians, was built to commemorate the coronation of
Ivan the Terrible as the first tsar of Russia in 1547. There are some
architectural similarities between this church and the Cathedral of Saint Basil
the Blessed at the Red Square in Moscow, built a decade later, which some
people like to assume that the church in Diakovo was also built by Barma and
Posnik Yakovliev, the two leading Russian builders, and that most probably the
young tsar ordered its construction. The cross-shaped foundation of Saint
John"s church carries at each end a tower-like chapel, joined together by
the central chapel which is considerably larger and taller. Thus the
traditional five-cupola form was preserved, though in a very original way. We
do not know what the first cupolas looked like; those that we see now are of
Byzantine type and date from considerably later times, but most of he other
features of the church remained the same. All the towers are octagonal with
recessive rows of decorative kokoshniki, two rows in the central chapel and
three in the side chapels, forming the transition between the base and the
towers. The drum of the central tower is constructed of 8 large semi-cylinders
and adds to the originality of the entire structure, another curiosity added in
the 17th century, is the built-in bell tower that we see on the western side of
the church in between the two chapels. Besides the kokoshniki their are several
other decorative bands that embellish the church, in addition to the frescoes
on its walls.
|
|
