Russian church architecture meets at the crossroads of Byzantium and the Kievan Rus’ in eastern Europe along important trade routes. The Rurik dynasty, originally from Scandinavia, built fortified cities and consolidated the Slavic and Finnic tribes in Russia. Shortly after the Baptism of the Rus’ into Orthodoxy around 988 AD, Prince Vladimir and his son Yaroslav began building churches in the 10th -11th such as the Church of the Tithes (Theotokos) and St. Sophia Cathedral in Novgorod, a church that was modeled after the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and it used the traditional cross-in-square shape. From the beginning of the Russian church, the government and ruling authorities supported the construction of Orthodox churches. The golden ratios of Byzantine tradition were inherited and incorporated as traditional measurements that captured best the divine beauty of worship. A unique measurement system called the sazhen – based on the proportions of the human body – were used to achieve “harmony and completion,” just like the cubit in the Old Testament, the golden ratios of Classical Greece and Rome, and the principle of proportion in Constantinople.
The first principles of Byzantine and Old Russian architecture started with beauty, which grew out of the harmony between church and state. The later stages of Russian church history discuss how the lands of the Rus’ maintained this spiritual understanding under the Golden Horde, the Grand Principality of Moscow, the westernizing Petrine period, the Revolution and the post-Revolution time of the restoration of churches and icons in the 20th and 21st centuries. Under Tatar rulers, who were preferred against their other rivals, the Catholic Teutonic Order, church materials and buildings were scarce, but tradition seems to have been preserved. The Moscow Kremlin was built by Italian architects who often preserved the Russo-Byzantine traditions of golden ratios and sazhens rather than copying models blindly. There are many unique features of Russian churches. Kremlin is the Russian word for walled city or fortified city (kreml), and they appeared in many of the major cities included in the lands of Rus’: Pskov, Novgorod, Vladimir, Suzdal. Wooden churches, like the famous Kizhi Island’s church, were built without nails. The iconostasis tended to verticalize with many tiers of icons stacked up. Tent-roof churches stretched toward the heavens and bell towers, also called belfries, are examples of how Russian Christians acculturated western church forms with “originality.” Onion domes too became a distinctive mark of architecture that was topped with an eight-pointed Orthodox cross and a crescent moon at the base of it that symbolized “royal power” in Byzantium. The Bell Tower of Ivan the Great and the Resurrection Cathedral at the New Jerusalem Monastery at Istra near Moscow are well-known examples of the renewal of Russian architectural features and the acculturation of eastern and western forms.
The introduction of classical Renaissance and baroque styles into Russia, through the “window of the west” in St. Petersburg in the 18th – 19th c. affected the spiritual dimension of Russian architects, iconographers and artists, and so a break in tradition occurred. The traditional proportions were abandoned in favor of copying baroque structures in western Europe. It is said that barocco refers to the irregular shape of a pearl, and the Renaissance tradition brought with it a rejection of classical proportions in favor of fluid, opulent and earthy artistic styles that fit neither with the preceding generation of Christians in western Europe during the Romanesque period, which still used a mixture of Roman, Byzantine and local Germanic architecture with the use of golden ratios, nor did it fit with the prayerful ethos of Orthodoxy in eastern Europe. Due to this change in the purpose of beauty, the sanctuary became distant, and the varied “embellishments” of pictorial paintings distracted from prayer, and the principle of proportions became outdated. In the 19th c., attempts to revive Old Russian architecture under Nicholas I by mixing Byzantine and modern styles increased, as seen in the Church of the Spilled Blood in St. Petersburg and Christ the Savior Church. Some criticized these revivals. Prince Eugene Trubetskoy considered the Church of Christ the Savior to be “devoid of harmony” and a “spiritual decline,” and a sign of “deep spiritual deterioration.” This “eclecticism” was not viewed as a standard of harmony for Orthodox Christians in Russia. Metropolitan Hilarion, however, argues that this revival is guiding people toward authentic Russian churches. The building is not perfect because it still lacks the use of proportional measurements. He views it as, “the path to liberation from western captivity.” After the Soviet period, the sazhen system, the alphabet, and numerical system had been updated or become obsolete. The metric system, for example, was imported from France after their revolution. But the contemporary trend for architects is to imitate Old Russian and Byzantine models, and the government again has been subsidizing these church buildings like the Resurrection Cathedral at Istra. The form and proportions of church buildings affect the spiritual meaning and experience of the worship for Christians. The world of change, fluidity, and sensuality that derive from the specific rational and progressive values of the Renaissance, with its loss of classical proportionality, can create a disorienting impression, if the goal of Orthodox prayer is commune with the Holy Trinity like the icons of Rublev. The sazhen measurements were like guides of tradition. Similarly, interpretations of scripture without the proper proportions and guides can be dangerous structures to build within the mind. The disarrangement of thoughts, shapes and images of the mind can become disorganized. So, the next chapter discusses the proper arrangement of church objects for liturgical worship in an Orthodox church.