Church of St. Simeon Stylites on Povarskaya

At the start of Novy Arbat, surrounded by Soviet-era high-rises, stands the small, five-domed Church of St. Simeon Stylites. The stone building was erected under Tsar Fyodor Alekseyevich, with construction completed in the very last years of the 1670s, and the ornate decoration of its façades reflects techniques typical of Moscow architecture of that period. The main altar is dedicated to the feast of the Presentation of the Virgin Mary in the Temple, while the two side chapels bear the names of St. Simeon Stylites and St. Dimitry of Rostov.

A wooden church already stood on this spot as early as 1625; according to one version, it was consecrated on the day of Boris Godunov’s coronation, which coincided with the feast of St. Simeon Stylites. The stone church was given a refectory, a bell tower, and two side chapels with separate apses and domes — an appearance typical of Moscow architecture of the second half of the 17th century.

After the revolution the church was closed, and by 1930 it had effectively been condemned to demolition. The decaying building miraculously survived and stood in a half-ruined state into the 1960s, when a new wide thoroughfare — the future Kalininsky Prospekt — was being laid nearby, and the question of demolishing the church arose again, since the monument obstructed the view of the new high-rises. According to legend, when an excavator was brought up to the church, the public figure Leonid Antropov climbed directly into its bucket and refused to let work begin until an order was produced placing the building under state protection.

A large-scale restoration took place in 1966–1968: the original shape of the roof and its kokoshniks were restored, later additions were removed, and the historic window and door openings were reinstated. The building was not, however, allowed to be used for its intended purpose — in 1968 it was handed over to the Society for the Protection of Nature as an exhibition hall for guinea pigs, parrots, and other small animals, which finally destroyed what remained of the interior decoration. The church even briefly appeared on screen twice in the comedy “Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession.” Only in 1990 were crosses returned to the domes, and in 1992 the building was handed over to believers — an icon of St. Simeon preserved by parishioners took its historic place once more.

The church was long favoured by the Moscow intelligentsia as a place for weddings: the writer Sergei Aksakov was married here in 1816, the future Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod Konstantin Pobedonostsev in 1866, and Elena Nyurenberg — later the wife of Mikhail Bulgakov — in 1918. There is also a legend of the secret wedding of Count Nikolai Sheremetev and the actress Praskovya Zhemchugova in 1801, although documentary evidence of that ceremony has been found in the records of another Moscow church.

In the last years of his life, Nikolai Gogol, who lived nearby on Nikitsky Boulevard, was a parishioner of this church; its rector gave the dying writer communion at his home in February 1852. Today the church is an active parish and one of the few architectural islands of pre-Petrine Moscow to have survived amid the modern development of the capital’s centre.