Church of St. Barbara the Great Martyr on Varvarka

The Church of St. Barbara the Great Martyr stands on Varvarka Street in Zaryadye, among a row of old Moscow churches near the Kremlin. The small building in the Classicist style stands out amid the surrounding dense development with its rounded silhouette and tall dome. Today it is an active parish church, part of the patriarchal metochion of the churches of Zaryadye, preserving the memory of the trading settlement (posad) that once occupied this part of the city.

According to tradition, the first wooden church on this site existed as early as the 14th century. In 1514 the Italian architect Aloisio the New built a stone church here with funds provided by wealthy Surozh merchants who traded with Sudak in Crimea. In 1795 Metropolitan Platon of Moscow ordered the dilapidated building demolished as unbefitting such a prominent location in the city. The new church was built in 1796–1804 by architect Rodion Kazakov, funded by artillery major Ivan Baryshnikov and bell-foundry owner, merchant Nikolai Samgin.

Kazakov's building is executed in the forms of mature Classicism: the semicircular volume is topped with a dome bearing a miniature cupola, while the northern and southern façades are decorated with four-column porticoes with Corinthian capitals. The building stands on a high plinth, and two tiers of windows, together with the light openings of the drum, flood the interior with light. The walls are finished in artificial marble in warm pinkish-yellow tones, and part of the decoration is complemented by 19th-century paintings.

A city legend holds that in 1812 French soldiers turned the church into a stable, but the narrow, steep staircases and high plinth make this unlikely — it is more probable that the building simply suffered from fire and looters, and was restored in the 1820s. After the Revolution the upper tier of the bell tower was dismantled, and in the Soviet period the church was closed. Restoration work in 1965–1967, carried out by architect Georgy Makarov during the landscaping of the area near the Rossiya Hotel, returned the bell tower to its lost appearance. In 2007, a white-stone foundation of Aloisio's 16th-century building, with a four-lobed plan similar to the Church of Metropolitan Peter, was discovered beneath the building.

Church services resumed in 1991. In 2014–2015 a large-scale restoration took place: based on surviving photographs from the 1880s, the stucco decoration of the façades, the crowning of the bell tower and the crosses were recreated, and the wall plaster was renewed. After the demolition of the Rossiya Hotel and the creation of Zaryadye Park, the church found itself in a new urban landscape at the boundary between the historic buildings and the modern park.

The Church of St. Barbara the Great Martyr remains one of the few surviving monuments of old Varvarka — a street once lined with parish churches and merchants' chambers. Its Classicist appearance and multilayered history — from the medieval trading settlement to the modern park — make the building a notable part of the architectural heritage of central Moscow.