Виртуальный Владимир

Let us now make our way to the Convent of the Depo­sition of the Robe along Old Street (Staraya Ulitsa) which leads from the market place to the monastery. On the right-hand side we see the Church of St. Lazarus.

There was a wooden church of the same name on this spot by the north gates of the stockade in the fifteenth century, which possessed a tent-shaped spire at the be­ginning of the seventeenth century. The present five-domed church built in 1667 has an exterior typi­cal of many seventeenth-century churches. It has a cube-shaped main body with three apses, differently designed portals on each wall, a rich cornice of horseshoe-shaped kokoshniks and a band of tiling. The same kokoshnik motif decorates the bases of the corner dome drums and the drums themselves are adorned with a band of blind arcading. Unlike most churches of this type, however, where the corner dome drums do not have windows, all five drums possess them. This is explained by the church's unusual two-pillared construction. Inside it has two pillars supporting two pairs of longitudinal arches suspended between the east and west walls. The arches are vaulted and the drum of the dome stands on small pendentives in a space in the central vaults between the pillars. This kind of construction was known as early as the sixteenth century and first appeared in the northern towns beyond the Volga from whence it spread to the Volga area. The existence of such a building in Suzdal suggests that it may have been the work of build­ers from the north, possibly from Vologda. The cathe­dral in the Monastery of St. Basil, built slightly earlier, can possibly also be ascribed to them. We shall see the latter towards the end of our tour of Suzdal.

The main church forms a pair with the heated Church of Si. Antipius built a century later in 1745, which has a fine decorative crest of open metalwork running along the ridge of the roof. At its west end it is ad­joined by a very attractive, slender bell-tower which ap­pears to have been erected somewhat earlier and has a concave tent-shaped spire typical of Suzdalian architec­ture and round lucarnes. It is very similar to the bell-tower of the Church of St. Nicholas in the kremlin. When this group of buildings was restored by Alexei Varga-nov in 1959 the bell-tower was repainted in its original bright colours making it stand out from the other Suzdal bell-towers. The fashion for ordering buildings to be decorated in bright colours was typical of an earlier period, the seventeenth century.


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