Город Владимир Путешествие по древним городам Владимирской земли Старый Владимир Old Russian Towns Памятники архитектуры Музеи Музеи, экспозиции

Город Суздаль История Суздаля Герб суздаля Архитектура Суздаля Музеи Суздаля

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We shall now proceed northwards to the Monastery of St. Alexander not far from Kamenka. According to seventeenth-century records it was founded by Alex­ander Nevsky in 1240. The monastery was greatly favoured by the early Moscow princes Ivan Kalita and his son Ivan II, and was also called the Great Lavra (Bolshaya Laura), a name given to the most important monasteries. Nothing remains of this very early period except two gravestones with inscriptions telling us that the Suzdal princesses Maria (1362) and Agrippina (1393) were buried here. In the first half of the eight­eenth century the small monastery was surrounded by a low wall with little decorative towers consisting of a square base with corner pilaster strips and a slender brick

tent-shaped spire with imitation tiny windows. Thes miniature towers were obviously a copy of larger ones In the south side of the wall there are the Holy Gates restored in 1947, whose faceted tiered drum with its tri­angular top repeats those on the Trinity Cathedral in the Convent of the Deposition of the Robe. These gates were in fact built by Gryaznov. Thus we find various details recurring in the different buildings scattered all over the town and blending them into a harmonious whole.

Through the gates on an open piece of ground stands the large Church of the Ascension with a tall separate bell-tower built by the monastery in 1695 on funds pro­vided by Peter the Great's mother, the Tsarina Natalia in place of a tent-shaped wooden church. The small log houses still standing nearby give one a clear idea of the striking contrast between church buildings and ordinary dwellings in old Russia. The "House of God" dominated the houses of men both in size and sump­tuous decoration, emphasising the concept of the om­nipotence of the Divine and the insignificance of his ser­vants. This concept, however, which had been unques-tioningly accepted by the credulous twelfth-century in­habitants of Suzdal living in their poor dug-outs and impressed  by  Vladimir  Monomach's   great   cathedral, now  became  of  secondary  importance.   The  churches were now being built for the people by their own crafts­men. This explains the highly decorative, sometimes in­timate  character of church buildings, which  even  ex­tended to the monasteries. The decoration of the Church of the Ascension contains nearly all the features which we have seen in other specimens of late Suzdalian archi­tecture and here too they are employed in such a way as to create a building with an entirely original charac­ter of its own. The main south wall is particularly beau­tiful. It is designed with great clarity and logic, and the architect has introduced a considerable measure ofl order into the decoration without reducing it to cold symmetry. The shadows of the windows and portal and the fine outline of the cornice emphasise the large white

surfaces of the walls. The corners of the square main body of the cathedral are decorated with light, narrow pilaster strips, whereas the apse is adorned with paired half-columns. The decoration of the drums repeats that of the window surrounds: small semi-columns with bead moulding that looks like a string of pearls round the neck of the dome. Instead of forming the usual pair with a small heated church, the church has a chapel and parvis adjoining its north wall. The bell-tower is plainer than the church relying on its architectural lines alone. Its low square base carries a very tall slender octagon with a more elaborately decorated bell-tier and a tent-shaped spire with long narrow windows.

From the Church of the Ascension there is an excel­lent view of the Convent of the Intercession standing on the right bank of the Kamenka, its white buildings sur­rounded by a low wall with towers.

We shall now make our way towards it passing through the Holy Gates and along a shady path leading to the river.

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