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The luxury minded Patriarch undertook a
large construction program throughout the country, partly in an attempt to
prove that his spiritual power was superior to the tsar's temporal power. He
built several monasteries and churches, but concentrated particularly on the
Monastery of the Resurrection (Voskresenskii Monastir) at the village of
Voskresenskoe, located about thirty miles west of Moscow and renamed Istra
after the revolution. To commemorate his name with a magnificent church, Nikon
mobilized the best builders, stone carvers and artists, and established various
workshop on the spot. Special attention was paid to tile works. He organized an
important center of tile production there, and invited masters from White
Russia to teach Russians how to glaze and color tiles. Colored tiles became the
major decorative item of the new Cathedral, both interior and exterior. There,
for the first time, use was made of multicolored tiles, and tiles of various
forms, reliefs and shapes for ornamentation of cornices, pilasters,
entamblatures, portals and even of entire iconostases.
The construction of the main edifice in the Monastery, the Cathedral of the
Resurrection, began in 1656. Nikon's idea was to reproduce in Russia the
ancient church in Jerusalem where Christ was buried, and a model and plan of
the old church were brought to Moscow. Several localities, rivers and hills in
the vicinity of the Monastery received new names, borrowed from those in
Palestine. Thus the river Istra was renamed Jordan and the nearby grove the
garden of Gethsemane. The Monastery itself became known as New Jerusalem
(Novo-Yerusalimskii). The Patriarch was so involved in the construction of the
Cathedral that he not only supervised the work, but was often seen making or
carrying bricks himself. Some art historians assume that the Cathedral was
built by Averkii Mokeyev and Ivan Belozer and the members of their team.. They
did their best to follow the main features of the original church, but they
succeeded in creating only a resemblance. The new Cathedral had 29 chapels
instead of 14, and several other architectural changes distinguished one
cathedral from the other. Besides lavish luxurious tile ornamentation, the new
Cathedral introduced in Russia an entirely unusual style. As such it
represented an break in the forced austerity that some zealots wanted to
preserve and which Nikon at moments had had to condone.
Before the Cathedral was finished, Nikon was deposed and exiled, and the
construction stopped in 1666. It resumed only after the death of Tsar Aleksei,
and the Cathedral was completed in 1685. In 1690 Yako Bukhvostov and his team
built the monastery walls and the church over the gate. The most interesting
part of this complex architectural monument was the rotunda on the western
side, with a dome almost 75 feet in diameter, just over half the size of the
one in Michelangelo's Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome. The light streamed in
through eight windows, and the entire dome collapsed in 1723, and a few years
later the Cathedral was ravaged by fire. The restoration was begun only in 1749
when count Bartholomeo Rastrelli designed a new wooden dome with 75 oval dormer
windows. Several other changes were made later by other architects, and the
Monastery and its Cathedral continued to be one of the most interesting
architectural compositions in Russia. The revolution put an end to this; the
monks were chased out and their property confiscated. Then came neglect and
dilapidation, until in 1941 a German shell hit the Cathedral and knocked down
the dome. After the war the Monastery was turned into a museum. Several other
personalities besides Nikon were buried there, including the wife of the famous
Russian general A.V. Suvorov.
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