Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker in Podkopy

In the Basmanny District, where Podkopayevsky Lane crosses Podkolokolny Lane near Khitrovka, stands the Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker in Podkopy. The main altar is dedicated to the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God, while two side chapels commemorate St. Sergius of Radonezh and St. Nicholas himself.

The site is linked to the history of Moscow’s Kulishki district, once a marshy lowland at the confluence of the Moskva River and the Yauza. In the 15th century Prince Vasily I’s summer palace stood here, and in 1493, when a fire destroyed the grand-ducal residence in the Kremlin, Ivan III himself lived for a time by the local Church of St. Nicholas while waiting for a new palace to be built — this is the church’s first written mention. The name “Podkopy” gave rise to many legends: according to one, thieves dug a tunnel under the wall to steal the silver casing from the venerated icon of the saint, and one of them was buried under collapsing stones; according to another, the saint himself allowed a ruined merchant to secretly take the icon’s precious cover, and the merchant later repaid the debt many times over. A more prosaic version links the name to a clay pit that once occupied the site — and indeed, during a recent floor repair, abandoned vaulted passages were actually discovered beneath the building.

Restorers established that the church’s present-day quadripartite core (chetverik) was built in the 1550s using thin “Ivan the Terrible-era small brick” — the same brick used to build the side chapels of the Kremlin’s Annunciation Cathedral. It is mentioned as a stone church in 1657; a cemetery was established beside it in 1686, and in 1731 the building was rebuilt with funds provided by the widow of Count Andrei Matveyev. The fire of 1748 and the devastation of 1812, during Napoleon’s invasion, also left their mark: some of the side chapels later had to be closed due to disrepair.

Revival came in 1855, when the church was transferred to the Moscow representation (podvorye) of the Patriarchate of Alexandria. Restoration to a design by architect Nikolai Kozlovsky was funded by the Moscow merchants Nikolai Kaulin and Alexei Shevyolkin, and the consecration of the renovated church took place in January 1858. The building was renovated twice more in the 1870s–1880s with funds from honorary citizen Alexei Rastorguyev, and a chapel was built nearby in 1885.

The Soviet era proved destructive: in 1929 the church was closed and desecrated, its crosses and domes torn down, and from the mid-century until 1990 the premises housed a tool shop of the Polietilen factory — the interiors were destroyed, the volume was divided into two floors, and the chapel’s tented roof was dismantled in the 1970s. The church was returned to the faithful in 1991; subsequent restoration uncovered 17th-century kokoshniks on the façade of the chetverik and confirmed that the masonry dated to the mid-16th century.

Today the church runs a Sunday school and rhetoric courses for adults, and it remains one of the most atmospheric monuments of old Moscow in the former Kulishki district, preserving a layered and largely legendary history of almost six hundred years.