Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian in Starye Pany

The Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian in Starye Pany stands in Kitai-Gorod, on Staropansky Lane, which is named after this very church. The main altar is consecrated in honor of the unmercenary healers Cosmas and Damian, while the northern chapel is dedicated to the Dormition of the Mother of God, which is why the church has long also been known as the Dormition Church “in the Old Singers' Quarter.” Today the parish belongs to the Iversky Deanery of the capital's diocese.

The name of the area itself dates to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when a Polish lords' court stood here — a kind of embassy-and-merchant compound of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, already documented in 1508. Patriarchal choir singers settled nearby, which is why the church also came to be called “in the Singers' Settlement.” The first wooden church was built in 1462, at the point where roads from Zaneglimenye and Zayauzye converged toward Borovitsky Hill; after the fire of 1564 it was rebuilt in stone as a two-tiered cuboid structure with five domes. According to legend, it was here that Ivan the Terrible married his sixth wife, Vasilisa Melentyeva.

In 1640, when the parish found itself within the bounds of the singers' settlement, the Dormition chapel was added on the north side, giving the church its second name. In 1803 the building was rebuilt in the Classicist style, with a new refectory and bell tower added; the oldest part remained the Cosmas-and-Damian cuboid, after which the lane was called Kosmodamiansky before the revolution. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, architect Andrei Stratilatov built an income-generating apartment building with shops and a church library on behalf of the clergy, which was rebuilt in the 1910s by architect Pavel Visnevsky.

In 1926–1927 restorer Dmitry Sukhov restored the church's twin tent-roof crowning and the ancient forms of its portals and window surrounds, although the bell tower and refectory had already been demolished by then to make way for the Prombank building. Soon afterward, however, the church was closed, and in 1931 it was deliberately disfigured: the apse was dismantled, the tent roofs were removed, the stucco molding was knocked off, the portal was bricked up, and a new wing was added in place of the western section — Sukhov's restoration work was completely destroyed. For decades the disfigured building housed Soviet institutions, including a traffic-regulation department of the State Automobile Inspectorate, and later commercial organizations that occupied the former church premises without any trace of their original purpose.

The church was returned to the parish in 1995, and in 2000–2001 architects Boris Levyant and Vladimir Pavlov recreated the northern chapel with its façade facing the lane, basing their work on Sukhov's prewar drawings and surviving descriptions from the early twentieth century. Today regular services have resumed at the church, and its appearance stands as a rare example of how a medieval Moscow building survived twentieth-century destruction and found a second life in the historic quarter of Kitai-Gorod.