The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on Sparrow Hills: What the Ground Revealed

Alexander Vitberg’s design for the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour placed it on Vorobyovy Gory. Work had stopped by 1826, but the brief explanation that ‘unstable ground prevented construction’ conflates two different sites: the slope into which the architect set the lower church, and the level ground at the top. Engineers considered it impossible to build the enormous cathedral on the sloping riverbank; some specialists allowed for a different solution on the summit, while qualifying the limits of their assessment. The move to Volkhonka was the result of a series of design, construction and government decisions, rather than a single test of the ground.

Why was Vorobyovy Gory chosen for the first design?

Alexander I announced his intention to build a cathedral in Moscow to commemorate the events of 1812, and Vitberg proposed a site from which the building could be seen at a distance. The manifesto of 25 December 1812 expresses gratitude for the country’s deliverance and calls for the memory of those who took part in the war to be preserved. It did not yet specify the future cathedral’s exact location or appearance.

A design competition began in 1813. By December 1815, around twenty proposals had been submitted, according to the cathedral’s history section. The entrants included Andrei Voronikhin, Vasily Stasov, Osip Bove and Alexander Vitberg; the emperor approved Vitberg’s design. The competition addressed what form the memorial cathedral should take, but building it also required a site to be chosen, the drawings to be refined, and the quarrying and transport of stone to be organised.

Vitberg proposed a site between the Smolensk and Kaluga roads. According to the explanation given in the history of the project on the cathedral’s website, the vast building would have been visible in its entirety from Devichye Pole; the roads recalled the enemy army’s entry into Moscow and its retreat. In the early nineteenth century, the site lay beyond the city’s dense built-up area. The architect used that distance to his advantage in a monumental composition that could not have been viewed to the same effect in the confined city centre.

Vitberg intended the high bank of the Moskva River to form a natural base for the structure. Moving the building from the slope to the summit would have changed both the requirements for its foundations and the view of the cathedral from Devichye Pole that the architect envisaged.

How did Vitberg’s artistic background affect construction?

By the State Russian Museum’s biography, Vitberg studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts from 1802 to 1809, won awards for painting, and became an academician in 1816 for his painting ‘The Deliverance of the Apostle Peter from Prison’. He came to Moscow in 1813 and turned to architecture. His 1815 design grew out of artistic exploration rather than years of experience directing construction; that fact alone does not establish that he made engineering errors.

Alexander I appointed the designer to head the commission responsible for building the cathedral. The cathedral’s history notes that Vitberg lacked substantial experience in construction and administration. Artistic and administrative responsibility thus rested with the same person. Turning the approved design into a building required separate decisions about foundations, supplies, contracts and spending controls; neither the façade nor imperial approval could take the place of that work.

How was Vitberg’s cathedral designed around the slope?

Vitberg envisaged a cathedral of three vertically arranged sections. The lower church, dedicated to the Nativity of Christ, was to be set into the riverbank slope; above it would stand a church dedicated to the Transfiguration, then a circular upper church dedicated to the Resurrection. In this design, the terrain was part of both the building and its symbolic meaning. A section drawing from 1817 and a general plan from 1825 are published in the cathedral’s history section.

A staircase more than 106 m wide was to ascend in five terraces, beginning about 149 m from the Moskva River embankment. Colonnades up to 640 metres long each were planned in front of the lower church, with two triumphal columns, each 106 metres high, on either side. Vitberg wanted to use guns captured from the enemy in Russia and beyond for the triumphal columns: the monument’s material, too, was intended to recall the war of 1812. These are dimensions and features of the design, not measurements of surviving structures. The riverbank linked the long approach, the church set into the slope and the upper structure in a single spatial sequence. Building only at the top would have removed the underground level and the ascent that was central to experiencing the ensemble.

The lower church was intended as a place to commemorate the dead and preserve the memory of those who fought in 1812. It was no ordinary basement that could simply be moved to level ground without loss. Removing the underground level would have eliminated the space to which the architect had assigned a distinct memorial role. Vitberg linked architectural form to a religious interpretation of body, soul and spirit; the three dedications were meant to be understood as one journey upwards.

According to calculations cited in the history of the project, the total height from the foot of the hill to the cross would have reached 237 metres, while the above-ground section would have stood 170 metres high. These figures describe the proposed building, not a completed structure. Its scale helps explain why checking the foundations and staircases, and securing a supply of materials, could not have been mere formalities.

Why do the illustrations from 1817 and 1825 differ?

The cathedral’s website publishes an elevation and section drawing of the 1817 design, as well as a general plan from 1825. Over the years, Vitberg gave greater prominence to the upper section, placed the building at the centre of a rectangular square with a colonnade, and designed a gateway with two bell towers on the Kaluga Road side. These changes matter when assessing the engineering challenge: the commission was dealing with an evolving, exceptionally large ensemble, not a single competition drawing.

What was accomplished after the foundation ceremony in 1817?

The foundation ceremony took place on Vorobyovy Gory and earthworks began, but the cathedral itself was never built.

The cathedral’s history describes the formal ceremony and the preparatory work separately. A wooden cross was erected on the chosen site on 1 September 1817; the next day, the site was sprinkled with holy water and excavation for the foundations began; on 13 September, Vitberg laid the first four stones. The formal ceremony attended by Alexander I took place on 12 October. These dates mark the beginning of the undertaking and its public presentation, but do not in themselves show how far construction progressed in the following years. The extent of the later excavation must therefore be checked against accounts of the work carried out, rather than inferred from the ceremony’s grandeur.

In 1820, Alexander I approved the financial plan submitted by the architect. In 1821, the commission authorised the start of earthworks. According to the history of the project, stone quarrying began in the Vereya district in 1823, along with preparations for a waterway to transport it. A trial shipment succeeded, but large quantities could not be delivered: the Moskva River’s water level could not be raised high enough. The vast project remained dependent on an unresolved supply problem.

The account of the work on the cathedral’s website points to another organisational weakness: extensive earthworks went ahead before the ground had been studied thoroughly enough and without a clear decision on the foundations. This explains why a special commission later had to address the basic question of whether construction was possible on the chosen site. The effort already invested did not establish the original site as a technically sound choice.

Vitberg himself proposed suspending the commission’s activities pending the emperor’s decision and reported the difficulties. Alexander I died in late 1825, depriving the architect of the patron who had personally supported his vision. Nicholas I halted the work and ordered an assessment of whether construction could continue. The chronology calls for a distinction between the effective halt to construction, the engineering survey of 1826 and the subsequent formal dissolution of the building commission.

What had several years of work produced?

The state historical and cultural assessment reports that, before construction finally stopped, workers had managed only to excavate part of the pit for the lower church and level the area in front of it. Neither the three stone levels nor completed foundations for the vast ensemble were built. This detail distinguishes what was actually done from later images that show the cathedral as a complete structure on the slope.

The history of the project on the cathedral’s website gives total expenditure as 4,132,560 roubles and 74¼ kopecks in paper currency. This included the commission’s running costs, materials, work to make the waterway navigable, barges, buildings, workers’ pay and provisions. These accounts do not show how much money, if any, individual participants in the construction may have misappropriated.

What did the 1826 commission establish about the ground?

The commission concluded that the great cathedral could not be built as Vitberg had designed it for the sloping riverbank. That finding concerned the slope and the design that extended across it; it did not mean that every part of the summit of Sparrow Hills had been deemed unsuitable for any building.

The committee assessed the original design, with its church set into the hillside, separately from a revised version without it. The possibility of building on the summit’s ground did not mean that the builders could realise the original vision in full. The authors of the published report expressly limited their conclusion to the strength of the ground; questions of architectural execution and the supply of materials remained open.

A rescript issued by Nicholas I on 4 May 1826 established a special engineering committee chaired by Karl Oppermann. It was asked three questions: could Vitberg’s cathedral be built on the chosen site; could a cathedral of a different design be built there; and should Vitberg’s design be moved to the upper plateau, abandoning construction on the slope? The way these questions were framed shows that the authorities distinguished between the site as a whole and the particular design of the building.

On the basis of surveys, plans and cross-sections, the specialists rejected the construction of an enormous cathedral on the sloping part of the hill. They also noted the spacious plateau at the summit. In the cathedral’s account of Vitberg’s design this finding appears alongside a further discussion of the upper site, so it would be a mistake to read only the first half of the conclusion.

The architects carried out further investigations for the revised version. They concluded that a building based on Vitberg’s approved design could be constructed on the summit of Sparrow Hills, but without the lower church. The qualification was significant: the conclusion concerned the strength of the ground, rather than whether the design could be realised in accordance with architectural principles and the necessary materials obtained. The commission had no grounds to present engineering feasibility as a completed construction plan.

Colonel Yanisch’s objection concerned the prospect of uneven settlement: he associated the springs on the slope with sandy ground and extended that concern to the upper plateau. This was an engineer’s forecast in a dissenting opinion, not a report of damage observed in a completed cathedral. The available publication gives the conclusions and the reasons for the disagreement, but not the full set of measurements that would allow a modern reader to calculate the stability of a particular foundation independently. It is therefore sensible to present both historical assessments with their qualifications, without treating either the majority view or the dissenting opinion as a definitive geological verdict.

Why did moving the cathedral to the summit fail to save the original design?

On the upper plateau, Vitberg would have had to redesign the cathedral: the lower church, which he had placed within the riverbank slope, had its own commemorative purpose. Removing it changed the spatial and symbolic progression through the entire cathedral.

Moreover, a favourable assessment of the ground’s strength did not settle questions about constructing the upper parts of the building, costs, transporting stone or managing the work. Documents from the 1820s show that preparations for construction proceeded while the design was still being refined. The failure to transport large quantities of stone and the lack of a foundation solution tested in advance were separate difficulties that cannot be reduced to the properties of the ground.

The change of patron also mattered. Alexander I’s personal approval made it possible to adopt such an unusual design and appoint Vitberg to lead the commission, despite his limited practical experience of construction. Under Nicholas I, the design was reassessed from engineering and administrative perspectives. The cathedral’s historical account also links the new emperor’s decision to a different view of Vitberg’s symbolic programme, but a single report on the ground cannot establish the relative weight of ideological, financial and technical factors.

How did responsibility for construction change?

After the first attempt, design and financial administration were separated; officials handled estimates, purchasing and contractors during construction of Thon’s cathedral. The investigation into the former construction commission should not be confused with the geological assessment. In 1835, Vitberg was convicted, his property was confiscated and he was sent to Vyatka; in a biographical note, the Russian Museum describes the charges against him as unjust. The cathedral’s history also describes irregularities in the proceedings. These assessments require separate archival research. To explain the fate of the project, it is enough to note that the administrative crisis developed alongside the technical difficulties and strengthened the case for abandoning the previous way of organising the work.

In the account of the construction of Thon’s cathedral the new arrangements are described in concrete terms. Architectural, engineering and technical matters were separated from estimates, tenders, purchasing and contracts; professional officials handled financial and administrative affairs. An additional council comprised artists and experienced administrators. This arrangement shows which management risks the authorities sought to limit after the first attempt. Without documentary evidence, it does not justify placing all the earlier problems personally on the architect.

The financial figures for the two phases also describe different undertakings. For the initial work on the new cathedral on Volkhonka Street, the source gives a figure of 1,405,825 roubles; the Vitberg commission’s expenditure covered lengthy preparations, a water transport route and the support of personnel. It would be wrong to compare these figures as the prices of two completed cathedrals. What matters is the shift to a different system of accounting and division of responsibilities, in which the designer was no longer solely in charge of every aspect of construction.

When did the decision to abandon construction on Sparrow Hills become final?

The first construction project on Sparrow Hills was abandoned in 1827, but Nicholas I did not make his final choice of another site until 1832. A Senate decree of 11 May 1827 dissolved the cathedral construction commission and transferred its affairs, buildings and materials to another department.

Even the date when work stopped needs careful handling. The historical and cultural assessment of the Palace of Pioneers complex states that work stopped in 1825; the cathedral’s own historical account dates the cessation of work already under way to 1826. Both accounts agree that Vitberg’s vision was never realised, while the Senate decree of 11 May 1827 documents the commission’s dissolution. These brief statements alone cannot establish the date of the last activity on the site or show that their authors mean the same event by ‘stoppage’. It is more historically sound to distinguish the winding down and cessation of work, the 1826 survey and the formal dissolution of the commission.

The commission’s dissolution in 1827 did not rule out construction on the summit of Sparrow Hills. In February 1830 Nicholas I ordered the architects to be asked whether they would agree to build a cathedral there. According to the records of the second competition, they agreed; some entrants proposed designs for the upper plateau. Vasily Stasov, for example, reworked a tiered composition for level ground rather than the slope.

What choices remained open in 1830?

Some entrants looked for a site closer to the centre. Fyodor Shestakov proposed a new square between Tverskaya Zastava and Butyrsky Val. Thon himself presented three options: near the Foundling Home, on Tverskaya Street by the Strastnoy Monastery, and on Volkhonka Street by the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge. Nicholas I’s decision in 1832 was a choice among different ways of placing the cathedral within the city. The account of Thon’s project also notes that no documentary evidence has yet established exactly how he received the decisive commission.

Some competition entries also retained a connection to the Moskva River. Osip Bove proposed Shvivaya Gorka to link the new cathedral to the panorama of the Kremlin and Kitay-Gorod; Ivan Tamansky designed an ensemble on Tsaritsyn Meadow opposite the Kremlin. Both proposals appear in the records of the second competition. The architects remained interested in the cathedral’s silhouette and its appearance from the river, although they sought other locations in Moscow. This is another reason not to attribute every subsequent choice solely to the ground conditions at the original site.

The records of the second competition show that the architects considered both the summit of Sparrow Hills and other parts of Moscow. The 1832 directive records the choice of Volkhonka and describes the site as more convenient, but it does not compare all the proposed locations. The surviving documents therefore identify the approved site and the alternatives put forward, but do not reveal the detailed order of Nicholas I’s preferences.

Why did Nicholas I choose Volkhonka and Thon’s design?

Nicholas I chose a site by the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge, between the Moskva River and Volkhonka Street, where the Alexeyevsky Monastery stood. Konstantin Thon presented the emperor with three possible locations for the cathedral; this was the one approved. In the directive of 10 April 1832 the emperor cited the obstacles encountered during the first construction project and described the new site as more convenient, within the city and similar in setting to the former one.

The second competition included proposals for the summit of Sparrow Hills. Alexander Melnikov proposed a circular five-domed cathedral with porticoes, while Alexander Kutepov designed a five-domed cathedral on a large rectangular square. Both architects reconsidered the building’s form and setting; willingness to build on the summit did not mean that Vitberg’s cathedral could be moved there without revising the drawings.

The 1832 directive refers to the obstacles faced by the first construction project as a whole and does not rank them by importance. It therefore cannot tell us which particular factor Nicholas I considered decisive in choosing Volkhonka.

Vitberg designed a vertical composition of three churches, using the riverbank as its base. Thon proposed a five-domed cathedral whose forms drew on early Russian and Byzantine architecture. His design was an independent architectural solution for a different site in Moscow.

According to the construction history on the cathedral’s website, a new foundation ceremony took place on Volkhonka on 10 September 1839. Nearly twenty-two years had passed since the 1817 ceremony on Sparrow Hills. During that time, the first construction project had been halted, the ground surveyed, a second competition held and another site chosen.

How did the panorama differ at the new site?

Thon’s cathedral and Vitberg’s unbuilt church both faced the Moskva River, but they were designed to be seen from different viewpoints. The original scheme envisaged a view from Devichye Pole; on Volkhonka, the five-domed building became part of a panorama of the Kremlin and the church towers of central Moscow. The account of Thon’s project cites the view of the Kremlin cathedrals and the Ivan the Great Bell Tower as an advantage of the chosen site.

The historical design must be compared with care to the view from today’s bridge near the Kremlin. The nineteenth-century bridge stood farther upstream, aligned with Lenivka Street; the present bridge was built to a different layout in the 1930s. A modern photograph taken from the crossing therefore does not precisely reproduce the viewpoint of the designers in the 1830s. To assess their spatial vision, it is more useful to consider old plans alongside the site as it is today.

How did the architecture change the way the war was remembered?

Vitberg intended the church set into the hillside as a place to commemorate all the soldiers who died in 1812. In Thon’s cathedral, commemoration was arranged around a gallery: accounts of battles, dates, commanders, the names of officers killed and wounded, and the total number of rank-and-file soldiers put out of action. The account of Thon’s project explicitly distinguishes between these programmes. Abandoning the lower level when the building was moved to the hilltop therefore changed more than its silhouette: it changed how the people for whom the monument was built would be named.

The dedications differed too. Vitberg arranged the Nativity, the Transfiguration and the Resurrection in a vertical sequence. In Thon’s cathedral, the main altar was dedicated to the first of these feasts, while the side chapels were dedicated to St Nicholas the Wonderworker and St Alexander Nevsky. The decree of 1832 declared that the earlier state vow would be honoured, but continuity of purpose did not require every religious and architectural choice made by Vitberg to be repeated.

What stood on the Volkhonka site before the new cathedral?

The approved site was occupied by the Alekseevsky Convent and the Church of All Saints. The history of the convent describes its seventeenth-century cathedral and bell tower as a striking ensemble of tent-roofed buildings. They were demolished to make way for Thon’s cathedral. Calling the site more convenient makes sense in terms of the new construction, but leaves out the cost of that choice to the older buildings and the convent community.

Izmailovsky Island was first considered as a new home for the Alekseevsky Convent, followed by a site on Vorobyovy Gory near the former Andreyevsky Monastery. The final choice was Krasnoye Selo, where the community moved in 1837. This sequence does not explain the assessment of the ground beneath Vitberg’s proposed building, but it shows that moving the cathedral to Volkhonka was part of a wider reshaping of the city.

What can and cannot be seen at Vorobyovy Gory?

Vorobyovy Gory reveals the central geographical argument behind Vitberg’s design: the high riverbank and the expanse opening out from it. Seeing the slope and the upper plateau as distinct parts of the terrain helps explain why the engineering commission reached different conclusions about them. There is no need to imagine that the spot where a visitor stands corresponds exactly to the cathedral’s proposed foundations.

Another source for understanding the project is the recollections of a contemporary. Alexander Herzen, who knew Vitberg during his exile in Vyatka, later devoted a chapter of My Past and Thoughts to him. In the memoir, the mountain itself becomes the lower part of the cathedral, while a colonnade embraces the space down to the river. It records how someone close to the architect understood the artistic vision behind the project. Herzen wrote his recollections years later and was openly sympathetic to Vitberg; his literary account cannot stand in for the 1817 drawings, the documents of the 1826 commission or the financial records. Reading the memoir alongside those sources allows us to appreciate the force of the idea without treating Herzen’s personal view of the court case as an established engineering reason for abandoning construction.

The published elevation, cross-section and site plan from 1817–1825 reveal more than the modern panorama. They show how the three levels were conceived and where the underground church would have sat within the slope. The building was never constructed; without comparing the historical plan with modern coordinates, it is impossible to point out the precise line of its walls to a passer-by with confidence. The panorama helps convey the scale of the vision, while the documents establish what was proposed and what the engineers actually examined.

The cathedral on Volkhonka was reconstructed between 1994 and 2000: Thon’s original building was destroyed in 1931. Its five domes, central mass and position in relation to the river and the Kremlin allow the architectural scheme of 1832 to be compared with Vitberg’s drawings. The cathedral standing today is not a surviving nineteenth-century building; no stone cathedral was ever erected at Vorobyovy Gory.

What remained after construction of the first cathedral was abandoned?

According to According to the historical and cultural assessment of the Palace of Pioneers complex, builders’ barracks remained at Vorobyovy Gory for some time and were later used as a transit prison. They were a physical trace of the undertaking, unlike any imagined ruins of the cathedral. In the late nineteenth century, the area became a place for walks and summer houses, and a reservoir for the Rublyovo water supply was built here in 1903. The present-day site has not preserved the nineteenth-century construction ground unchanged.

The main building of Moscow State University was erected on Leninskiye Gory, formerly Vorobyovy Gory, between 1949 and 1953. It became a new landmark on the skyline, but its existence does not disprove the 1826 conclusion about placing an enormous cathedral within the riverbank slope. The buildings belong to different eras and differ in their precise sites, construction and approaches to their foundations. The argument that ‘a tower was built here later, so the commission must have been wrong’ overlooks all these differences.

The cathedral’s history records another tangible link: in 1838, objects from the foundation ceremony for the first cathedral were moved from Vorobyovy Gory to the Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin. This ritual continuity preserved the memory of the project’s beginnings in 1817, while construction of the new building proceeded to different plans and at a different site. Documents and images, rather than a search for walls that were never built, now allow us to assess Vitberg’s design.

Why was the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour never built at Vorobyovy Gory?

The first Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was never built at Vorobyovy Gory because Vitberg’s original design depended on the sloping riverbank, which was judged unsuitable for such an enormous building. A later version on the upper plateau would have required abandoning the lower church and still left other construction questions unresolved. The suspension of work, the closure of the commission in 1827 and the choice of Volkhonka in 1832 were separate stages in the decision.

The shorthand claim that ‘the ground at Vorobyovy Gory was unsuitable’ obscures the crucial distinction between the slope and the hilltop. In 1826, experts ruled out building Vitberg’s cathedral on the sloping part of the riverbank, but some architects considered a revised design on the upper plateau possible. Colonel Yanish objected to that option too, fearing uneven settlement. In 1830, Nicholas I again asked the architects to consider the original hilltop site before approving a different location in 1832.

You can compare the reconstructed cathedral on Volkhonka with the terrain of the originally chosen site on Radius’s sightseeing tour by car: the published sample itinerary includes stops at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and Vorobyovy Gory. The exact places to visit are agreed when planning the tour.

Sources

1. Imperial Manifesto on the construction of a church in Moscow dedicated to Christ the Saviour, 25 December 1812
2. The first design competition for the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour
3. The cathedral designed by A. L. Vitberg
4. The second design competition for the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour
5. K. A. Thon’s design
6. Moscow sightseeing tour by car — a published itinerary from Radius Tour Bureau
7. Alexander Lavrentyevich Vitberg — biography in the State Russian Museum’s collection
8. State Historical and Cultural Expert Assessment Report for the Site at 4 Vernadsky Prospekt
9. Construction of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour
10. Alekseyevsky Convent — the history of the site on Volkhonka Street
11. State Historical and Cultural Expert Assessment Report for the Palace of Pioneers Complex on Sparrow Hills
12. A. I. Herzen. “My Past and Thoughts”, Part Two, chapter on A. L. Vitberg
13. Reconstruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour: participants and timeline, 1994–2000
14. Alla Aronova. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour: The History of Vitberg’s Design and Thon’s Cathedral
15. Alekseyevsky Convent: evidence of its relocation to Krasnoye Selo in 1837