Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker on Shchepy

The Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker on Shchepy stands in the Arbat District, where First Smolensky and Second Nikoloshchepovsky Lanes meet, just steps from the Garden Ring and Smolenskaya metro station. The parish traces its history back to 1649, when a wooden church dedicated to St. Nicholas of Myra — a patron saint especially revered across Moscow — was first built here.

The name “na Shchepakh” (“on the wood chips”) comes from the sovereign’s timber, or “Shchepnoy,” yard that once stood nearby, where log frames for the wooden palace buildings were made; the settlement of carpenters who worked there most likely formed the original parish. After the wooden church burned down, a new stone church was built in 1686, still under Patriarch Joachim, funded by parishioners — already in the fashionable Naryshkin Baroque style of the day. The building stretches from west to east following the traditional 17th-century layout: bell tower, refectory, and the main volume with apse projections.

The façades are decorated with details typical of the Naryshkin style — window surrounds with “broken” pediments, triple clusters of columns at the building’s corners, and a dentil course running beneath the kokoshniks. In 1773 a side chapel dedicated to the Righteous Simeon the God-Receiver and Anna the Prophetess was added in the refectory, later moved to a separate annex in 1884. The church suffered greatly during the 1812 invasion: French soldiers first looted it, and then it was damaged by fire. Its restoration, funded by public donations, came with an expansion — a chapel of the Apostles Peter and Paul was added, and in 1813 the bell tower that survives today was built. In 1882 the architect Nikolai Finisov erected another, northern chapel.

Services in the church were halted in 1934, and soon after the building was looted and rebuilt almost beyond recognition: the domes and the top of the bell tower were demolished, and the church cemetery was destroyed. The interior was converted into workshops: during the Great Patriotic War ammunition was produced here, and afterward, until the 1990s, it housed the “Artistic Engraving” enterprise. All that remained of the once-elegant Baroque landmark was the bare shell of its walls.

The building was returned to believers in 1993, and services resumed already in 1994. A large-scale restoration in 1999–2002 recreated the domes, turrets, and bell tower; in 2008 the iconostasis was restored and a minor consecration of the main chapel took place. The murals of the chapel of Simeon the God-Receiver and Anna the Prophetess were completed in 2009, and it was consecrated in 2014; painting work on the main volume continues to this day. The existing First and Second Nikoloshchepovsky Lanes are named after the church.

Among the church’s venerated shrines are an icon of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, an icon of the Life-Giving Trinity, and the Tabynsk Icon of the Mother of God. Today the church on Shchepy is an active parish and one of the few surviving examples of Naryshkin Baroque in Moscow — a building that outlived Soviet neglect and returned to its historical appearance.