Palace Church

OBJECT DESCRIPTION

The Palace Church was built in 17th century in the northern part of the Kazan Kremlin. One hypothesis argues that the church was built on the site of the former Nur Ali Mosque, which was standing there during the Khan’s period. The church was reconstructed in the 18th century and reconsecrated as Vvedenskaya Church. The walls were laid with huge bricks and plastered. The church embraced the Russian Baroque heritage.

The Vvedenskaya Church was designed as a “family chapel” to serve for the Kazan governor. The church services were led by a priest who lived in the palace, but the psalmists were invited.

The church burned down in 1749 but was rebuilt; however, after the fire of 1815, it was impossible to restore its original appearance. Until 1849, the surviving church buildings were used as gunpowder warehouses.

During a visit to Kazan in 1836, Emperor Nicholas I suggested that the burnt-down church be restored and connected to the Governor’s Palace, which was also scheduled to be built soon. The church was restored as a palace church in the Governor’s Palace.

In 1859, the church was dedicated to the Holy Spirit’s descent on the Apostles. The palace church in the name of the Descent of the Holy Spirit, with the chapel of the Holy Martyr Tsarina Alexandra, occupied the second floor, while on the ground floor there was a chapel in the name of Nicholas the Wonderworker, the church icon of which was donated in the middle of the 19th century by Anna Davydovna Boratynskaya, a representative of the local aristocracy.

The church’s icons and temple vessels, painted and created in the 19th century, were looted in 1918 and are no longer preserved.

During the Soviet time, the church functioned as a canteen. Its interior decoration was lost.

The new church replicated the burnt-down church’s basic structural elements. The building has a pyramid shape and is made up of various-sized volumes. Brick friezes beneath the roof and clusters of semi-columns with magnificent capitals adorn the volumes at the corners. Windows are decorated with graceful architraves with “cock’s combs”. The gallery is embellished with square decorative brickworks (shirinka) and a number of rectangular protrusions in the form of ornaments.

The church’s top is crowned with an onion dome on an octagonal drum with semicolons at the corners. The onion dome is adorned with oak garlands and leaves along the edges of its faces.

The church has an arched closed gallery; only a few temples with such an old architectural element borrowed from the tower-chambers (terems) have survived until today. The gallery was originally unglazed and consisted of three U-shaped balconies along the quadrangle’s perimeter. Then it was glazed and transformed into a bright corridor. The church was restored in 2002, and all of the window frames were made openable. Despite the fact that the church was not in operation, a UNESCO sign was installed on its dome. The sign was soon removed, and the church now has a dome with no sign or cross on top.

The church building’s second floor now houses a permanent exhibition of the Museum of History of the Tatar People and the Republic of Tatarstan. The first floor accommodates the museum’s exhibition hall.