Textile Capital, City of Brides and Constructivism

12 points8 km3.5 hours

Ivanovo is a city of many nicknames: the City of Brides, the city of the avant-garde, the Russian Manchester, the Calico Capital and more. Come see its Constructivist masterpieces up close and travel back in time in this avant-garde city, the youngest and most unusual city of the Golden Ring.

Route author

Susanin Team

Things to do

🔍🖼️ Spot interesting details
🍲🎶 Local culture

Route points (12)

Church of the Transfiguration in Ivanovo

Point on route “Textile Capital, City of Brides and Constructivism”

Point 10

Church of the Transfiguration

🕍 Place of worship • 🏟️ Architectural landmark

Historical Background

The Transfiguration Cathedral was built in 1893 to a design by the Moscow architect Alexander Kaminsky, who also designed the first building of the Tretyakov Gallery, the main church of the St. Nicholas Ugresha Monastery and Anna Lopatina's mansion on Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street in Moscow. The church complex includes the majestic church itself, a tall tent-roofed bell tower, and residential and service buildings. The cathedral was closed in 1940 and all its interior decoration was destroyed, but services resumed as early as 1944. For a long time the Church of the Transfiguration was the only working church in the entire Ivanovo Region. Its interiors were restored gradually.

Architecture

The cathedral was built at the end of the 19th century, when the Russian style was popular in church architecture: an imitation of 17th-century architecture with its rich decoration. The entire church complex, including the stone gates, is snow-white with bright blue roofs, and its look is so distinctive that it's hard to mistake for anything else in the city. The church has five domes set on tall faceted drums topped with bright blue onion domes. The decorative window surrounds and two tiers of kokoshniks (decorative arched gables) make the cathedral especially striking. Today, besides its architecture, the church is known for its wall paintings and its carved 18th-century Baroque iconostasis. The cathedral originally had a different iconostasis, but it was lost after 1940; in 1956 this one was brought here from the village of Saraevo in Furmanov District.