The Copper Plaque Beneath the Cathedral: How Ivanovsky Convent Was Restored

Viewed from Starosadsky Lane, two symmetrical towers rise above the wall, with a tall ribbed dome soaring farther back. The Holy Gates form a strict axis: tower, arch, tower, dome. This sequence is the first thing a passer-by notices, although the lower part of the cathedral is hidden by the enclosure wall. On the Ghost Hunters tour, the Ivanovsky Monastery becomes one of the landmarks of Ivanovskaya Hill; the walk approaches the convent from the outside.

Mikhail Bykovsky brought the cathedral, galleries, gates, towers and residential buildings together into a single composition. Yet in the mid-nineteenth century, the site was occupied by fire-damaged buildings adapted to other uses. After the fire of 1812, the convent was dissolved, its sisters dispersed and the restored cathedral turned into a parish church. For several decades, the word ‘monastery’ referred only to the past here.

A Bequest for an Empty Convent

In the spring of 1856, Elizaveta Alexeyevna Makarova-Zubachyova, the widow of a lieutenant colonel, submitted a petition to Metropolitan Filaret. She offered to re-establish a coenobitic convent on its former site at her own expense. Her request was detailed and almost administrative in nature: twenty-five nuns, twenty-five novices, and a specified complement of clergy and servants.

From the outset, the plan included a hospital with a church and cells for six elderly nuns. Makarova-Zubachyova intended to live there and care for the sick herself. A school for twenty-four orphaned girls from impoverished clergy families was later added to the programme. They were to be taught religious studies, history, geography, arithmetic, Russian, church singing and needlework. From the very beginning, the convent’s revival was linked to the creation of a shared community life.

Permissions, drawings and the relocation of residents from the old buildings all took time. Elizaveta Alexeyevna’s health was deteriorating. On 31 December 1857, she drew up a will: her real estate was to be sold, her movable property and recovered debts converted into money, and the resulting funds devoted to the Ivanovsky Monastery. She appointed her relative Maria Alexandrovna Mazurina to take full charge of the undertaking.

Makarova-Zubachyova died on 31 March 1858. The will was confirmed in May, and Mazurina assumed her role as executor. With it came a host of responsibilities: vacating occupied premises, purchasing properties to replace the monastic buildings, corresponding with the ecclesiastical consistory, securing approval for the plans and overseeing construction.

In 1859, the restoration proposal and its accompanying drawings received the approval of both the Holy Synod and the Emperor. The new ensemble was designed by Mikhail Bykovsky. He had already undertaken extensive work for Moscow’s monasteries and belonged to the historicist school of architects, who chose an artistic language suited to a building’s purpose. For Ivanovskaya Hill, he devised a solution that stood apart from the prevailing Russian-Byzantine style.

The old structures first had to be dismantled. In early 1860, the demolition of the dilapidated buildings and the former cathedral began under Bykovsky’s supervision. The historian Ivan Snegiryov visited the site several times. In his diary, he recorded the dismantled iconostasis, vaulted passages beneath the church and refectory, gravestones from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and seven bells. For a brief time, the building works exposed what would ordinarily have remained beneath the floor and deep within the walls.

Mazurina was determined that Filaret himself should conduct the foundation ceremony. It was delayed for a month because of the metropolitan’s ill health and other commitments. On 3 September 1860, he celebrated the liturgy at the neighbouring Church of St Vladimir, after which a religious procession made its way to the cleared site. The foundations of the main cathedral and hospital church were laid there. A silver-plated copper plaque measuring eight by nine vershoks was prepared for the foundation; its inscription named the church, its altars, the benefactress and the monastery being restored.

The priest Vasily Rudnev later recorded Mazurina’s account of her conversation with Filaret after the foundation ceremony. Maria Alexandrovna asked whether, given her poor health, she would manage to complete what she had begun. His brief reply has been preserved: ‘You will live to finish it.’ These words stayed with her through the years in which Mazurina was responsible for stonemasons, contractors and correspondence with government departments.

Stone, Deadlines and Unfinished Decoration

The documents restore a sense of the construction’s physical scale. On 15 February 1861, Mazurina signed a contract with a townsman named Noskov for stonecutting work. The contractor undertook to employ no fewer than thirty rough-stone masons under each foreman, to dress the stone to the architect’s dimensions and instructions, and to complete the masonry by 10 June. He missed the deadline. Mazurina took contractors to court and hired new ones.

In 1860–1861, the workers dismantled the former cathedral, raised the basement level of the new church to the plinth, and brought the hospital building and the Holy Gates with their galleries under roof. The bell tower and its matching companion tower were raised to their uppermost tiers. At the same time, the former printing-house building was remodelled and the abbess’s residence constructed. Several interconnected building projects proceeded at once on the confined site, all aligned along a single axis.

By the end of 1862, the cathedral walls were under roof, the arches between the piers had been completed, and the masonry and carpentry in the other buildings were nearing completion. During the following season, the cathedral’s domed vault was constructed, along with a timber framework for the dome beneath its iron cladding. Spires made of white-stone slabs over iron frames appeared on the towers, while the galleries were completed and plastered.

Bykovsky created a sense of drama through a succession of unfolding spaces. From the street, the enclosure wall conceals the base of the cathedral, while its dome is visible from afar. Between the two towers, the gates lead into the courtyard, where arched galleries draw the eye towards the cathedral façade. Inside stands a centrally planned, four-pier church. Researchers compare the ribbed dome to Florence Cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, and the towers to Giotto’s Campanile. Bykovsky did not copy the Florentine buildings: he combined these associations with an Orthodox layout and a Russian decorative idiom.

In 1864, the dome was clad in iron, cupolas were commissioned for the cathedral, towers and hospital church, and plastering and interior work continued. In January 1865, Mazurina informed the dean that all the buildings included in the plans had been erected. A note by Bykovsky added an important qualification: the final decoration was not expected to be completed before the end of 1867.

Once the walls were complete, the convent itself still had to be established: the premises needed finishing, a permanent income had to be secured, a rule drawn up, an abbess appointed and a community assembled. Filaret remained involved in these matters until his death in 1867. Mazurina continued the work for another eleven years after him. Her name is seldom discerned in the silhouette of the dome, although it was through her efforts that the bequeathed capital was transformed into contracts, reports, deeds of sale and completed buildings.

An Opening Without Its Benefactress

Maria Mazurina died on 21 October 1878. The opening was still a year away. After her death, a commission was established to oversee the restoration of the monastery, headed by Archimandrite Pimen, abbot of the Nikolo-Ugreshsky Monastery. He visited the construction site, chaired meetings almost every week and pressed for the work to be completed. The commission had to select an abbess for the coenobitic convent and prepare it for opening.

On 4 October 1879, Pimen consecrated the hospital Church of St Elizabeth and installed Abbess Rafaila Rovinskaya as head of the monastery. On 19 October, Metropolitan Makary consecrated the high altar of the Cathedral of the Beheading of St John the Baptist. Two days later, the side chapels dedicated to Our Lady of Kazan and St Nicholas were consecrated.

A photograph from 1882 shows the result soon after the opening: twin towers rise above the long wall, with the gates visible between them and the cathedral’s great dome beyond. The later urban congestion has yet to crowd the space before the enclosure. The image reveals Bykovsky’s approach to urban design: the monastery presents a unified façade to the lane while also anchoring the distant silhouette of the entire hill.

Elizaveta Makarova-Zubachyova lived to see neither the foundation ceremony nor the walls. Maria Mazurina saw the ensemble almost complete, but not the day of its consecration. Their vision nonetheless took precise form: a hospital church, residential buildings and a community governed by a single rule. In October 1879, the consecration of the churches marked the beginning of renewed monastic life. Two decades of construction culminated in the opening of the convent.

Sources

1. M. A. Mazurina — the woman who revived Moscow’s Ivanovsky Convent
2. The Construction of Ivanovsky Convent in Moscow
3. Neo-Renaissance in Russian Orthodox Architecture: Ivanovsky Convent in Moscow
4. Consecration of the Church Icon of the Venerable Pimen of Ugresh
5. Ivanovsky Convent in Moscow, photographed in 1882 — Wikimedia Commons