Church of the Ascension at the Nikitsky Gate

By the Nikitsky Gate stands the Church of the Ascension of the Lord, popularly known as the “Bolshoye Vozneseniye” (“Great Ascension”) — as distinct from the older and smaller neighboring “Maloye Vozneseniye” (“Lesser Ascension”) church. The main altar is dedicated to the feast of the Ascension, while the side chapels honor the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God, the Beheading of St. John the Baptist, St. Nicholas, and the icon “Joy of All Who Sorrow.”

A wooden church on this site is documented from 1619 and burned down a decade later; a stone five-domed church was built in the 1680s by Tsarina Natalya Naryshkina, whose estate stood nearby. In the 1780s the neighboring plot was acquired by Prince Grigory Potemkin, who dreamed of building a grand cathedral here for his Preobrazhensky Regiment; the architect Vasily Bazhenov himself was brought onto the project, but the weak foundation of the earlier building forced the plans to be abandoned, and Potemkin’s death in 1791 delayed construction for years. His nephew Nikolai Vysotsky took up the task of finishing it, commissioning a new design from the architect Matvei Kazakov.

The refectory with two side chapels was laid down in 1798, but the fire of 1812 destroyed the unfinished building, and work did not resume until 1816. It was in this refectory, on 18 February 1831, that Alexander Pushkin married Natalya Goncharova — the newlyweds had planned to marry in Prince Golitsyn’s private chapel, but Metropolitan Filaret insisted on the bride’s own parish church. The main volume was completed over decades: drawings were signed by architects Afanasy Grigoriev and Fyodor Shestakov, porticoes were added by Osip Bove in 1830, and construction was finished in 1848, again by Grigoriev — without the grand bell tower originally planned.

The church became the setting for many memorable events: funeral services were held here for the actor Mikhail Shchepkin in 1863 and for Maria Yermolova in 1928; in 1917 people came to bid farewell to military cadets killed in street fighting, and in 1920 Fyodor Chalyapin read the Epistle at his own daughter’s wedding. On 5 April 1925, Patriarch Tikhon conducted his last service here.

After its closure in 1931, the church was turned first into a warehouse and then into a garage, its iconostases were destroyed, and the old tented bell tower was demolished in 1937; decades later the building housed a laboratory of the Institute of Power Engineering. Services resumed in 1990, and between 2002 and 2004 a new sixty-meter bell tower was built, based on Shestakov’s lost original design, to replace the one that had been destroyed. A large-scale restoration of the interiors and wall paintings was completed only in 2018.

The building, executed in the Empire style, is a monumental quadripartite structure with side porticoes and a gilded dome on a cylindrical drum; the apse opens onto the square in a semicircle. Today it is the architectural dominant of the Nikitsky Gate and one of Moscow’s most revered churches, preserving the memory of Pushkin, Patriarch Tikhon, and many other notable Muscovites.