Cathedral of Christ the Saviour

About

The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (Храм Христа Спасителя) stands on the northern bank of the Moskva River, only a few hundred metres south-west of the Kremlin. At 103 metres in overall height, it is the third tallest Eastern Orthodox church building in the world.

The present cathedral is the second to occupy the site. The first was raised in the nineteenth century in fulfilment of Tsar Alexander I's manifesto of 25 December 1812, a thanksgiving for Russia's preservation against Napoleon and a memorial to the fallen. After early plans by Aleksandr Vitberg were abandoned, Tsar Nicholas I commissioned Konstantin Thon to design a Russian Revival church inspired by Hagia Sophia. Built over decades, it was consecrated on 26 May 1883, the day before the coronation of Alexander III; Russian masters including Kramskoi, Surikov, and Vereshchagin painted its interiors.

In 1931 the original cathedral was demolished by order of the Soviet Politburo to make way for a planned Palace of the Soviets, a colossal seat for the Supreme Soviet begun in 1937 but halted in 1941 by the German invasion; its steel frame was dismantled a year later, and the palace was never built.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the cathedral was rebuilt on its original site between 1995 and 2000, recovering both the silhouette and the memorial purpose of the nineteenth-century church.

History

The Belgrade architect Dušan Živanović designed the first Church of the Holy Trinity on this site; its foundations were consecrated in October 1925 and the completed church was solemnly consecrated on Spasovdan (Ascension Day), 18 May 1939. German bombing damaged the church on 12 April 1941, and that August the Ustaše regime ordered it demolished stone by stone, days after Bishop Platon of Banja Luka was murdered. A smaller replacement church was built in the bishop's courtyard in the 1960s and 1970s, but full reconstruction on the original site began only after Serbian Patriarch Pavle re-consecrated the foundations on 17 October 1993; building resumed in 1999 after a pause, and the rebuilt cathedral, now named for Christ the Saviour, held its first liturgy on 26 September 2004. Its solemn re-consecration fell, seventy years after the first, on Spasovdan, 28 May 2009.

Significance

Spasovdan, the movable feast of the Lord's Ascension, is the slava, the patronal feast day, of both the cathedral and the city of Banja Luka, marked each year by the city and the Eparchy together. Built in Serbian-Byzantine style with five domes over a footprint of roughly twenty-two by nineteen metres, with a bell tower rising some forty-seven metres, the cathedral is the principal church of the Eparchy of Banja Luka and, for the Serbs of the region, a rebuilt witness to a building the wartime Ustaše authorities once tried to erase entirely.

Architecture

Neo-Byzantine Serbian church architecture; cruciform plan with five domes