Church of St. Simeon Stylites beyond the Yauza

The Church of St. Simeon the Stylite beyond the Yauza stands on Nikoloyamskaya Street in the Taganka District and belongs to the Pokrovsky deanery. The main altar is dedicated to Simeon the Stylite himself, while the two side chapels are named in honor of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker and Metropolitan Demetrius of Rostov. The street where the church stands was once part of the old road to Vladimir and took its name from another local shrine — the Church of St. Nicholas in the Rogozhskaya Yamskaya Sloboda.

A wooden church was erected here in 1600, probably in memory of the fact that a year earlier, on the feast day of Simeon the Stylite, Boris Godunov had ascended the throne. By 1657 the church was already recorded as being made of stone. In 1731 parishioners began a rebuilding at their own expense: the St. Nicholas chapel was consecrated in November, and the main altar two years later. In the 1760s the cloth manufacturer Afanasy Malenkov paid for a new refectory with two chapels to a design by Ivan Nazarov, and in the 1780s a fence with gates was built around the church, which survives to this day.

The present building was begun in 1792 with funds from the industrialist Ivan Batashyov and the merchant Semyon Vasilyev; the design is presumed to be the work of the architect Rodion Kazakov. At the same time Batashyov was building his own town estate nearby, which later housed the Yauza Hospital. Construction proceeded with difficulty: in 1798 the dome collapsed in the nearly finished building and damaged the walls, and by 1812, when the church had been prepared for consecration, Napoleon's troops occupied Moscow — the church was plundered during the fire and the new iconostasis burned down. The church was finally consecrated only in 1813.

Standing on Taganka Hill, the Classicist church was visible from afar: a cuboid volume with porticoes supported a tall rotunda with a slender drum, and the dome was adorned with round oeil-de-boeuf windows. In 1847–1851 the architect Nikolai Chichagov created new iconostases for the altar and the chapels. In 1863 the parish acquired a bell weighing over six tons, for which a new three-tiered bell tower was built to a design by Kozlovsky, and in 1898 the building was reconstructed by the architect Nikolai Rozov.

In the late 1920s the church came under threat of closure. The rector, Archpriest Nikolai Benevolensky, preemptively moved the miracle-working icon of Simeon the Stylite and the venerated icon of Demetrius of Rostov with a particle of his relics to the neighboring Intercession Church across the street, and after the church was closed in 1929 he himself transferred there to serve. The building was converted into an educational institution: the two upper tiers of the bell tower were dismantled, the volume was divided by floors into seven stories, and ordinary openings were cut where the tall gates and rotunda windows had been, causing the structure to lose its former harmony.

Services resumed in 1995, when the venerated icons were solemnly returned. The parish opened a Sunday school and a school of church singing, and icon-painting and restoration workshops are in operation. Among the relics are icons of Demetrius of Rostov and St. Nicholas the Wonderworker with particles of their relics, and images of the protomartyr Stephen, Panteleimon the Healer, and Euphrosyne of Polotsk. Today the Simeonovsky Church remains an active parish and a monument of Moscow Classicism on Taganka Hill.