Church of the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God, Bykovo

What you're looking at

In a village southeast of Moscow, at the edge of an old country estate, stands a church that looks as if it has wandered out of a fairy tale. Instead of the onion domes of a typical Russian church, it rises in pale stone with pointed windows, slim black spires and a cluster of pinnacles around a drum and lantern capped in green-blue metal. The main body is rounded, almost a rotunda, and a lower wing runs off it toward two smaller towers, each topped by its own spire, with a separate bell tower standing nearby. Travel writers like to call it Russia's "Disney castle." It is in fact an eighteenth-century Orthodox parish church, and still a working one.

The building is two churches stacked one above the other. The upper church is dedicated to the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God, the revered Byzantine image of the Virgin and Child that has protected Moscow, by tradition, since the fourteenth century. The lower, "winter" church, easier to heat, is dedicated to the Nativity of Christ.

The detail most people miss is that the Gothic look is skin-deep, and deliberately so. The plan and the liturgical arrangement are fully Orthodox. What is "Gothic" is the dress: pointed windows, carved niches and needle-like pinnacles applied over a compact church body. Look closely at the rounded main volume and you see paired pilasters and arched niches that belong as much to Baroque and classical design as to anything medieval.

Who built it, and why

The church was commissioned by Mikhail Mikhailovich Izmailov, a Moscow governor and the owner of the Bykovo estate, and built in 1788–89. Izmailov raised it in memory of his late wife, Maria Alexandrovna Naryshkina. That makes the building, in part, a memorial: a church as an act of mourning, in the same spirit as the funerary chapels of Western Europe.

The architect is not documented. Most historians attribute the design to Vasily Bazhenov (1737/38–1799), the leading Russian architect of his generation and the man behind the unfinished Gothic palace at Tsaritsyno for Catherine the Great. Bazhenov worked with Izmailov, and the manor house at Bykovo is attributed to him as well, but no surviving document puts his name on the church; some writers add or substitute Matvei Kazakov, Bazhenov's colleague, or a local builder. Older online descriptions credit Bartolomeo Rastrelli, the architect of the Winter Palace, but Rastrelli died in 1771, well before the church was begun, and the attribution should be set aside. Nor is the church in St. Petersburg, as some sites claim: Bykovo lies in the Moscow region, roughly 35 to 40 kilometers southeast of the capital.

Why a Gothic church in Russia?

In the 1770s and 1780s a fashion for "Gothic" spread through the Russian nobility, encouraged by Catherine the Great's own taste for it. Russians called it simply gotika, but it borrowed freely from medieval Europe, from Moscow's own sixteenth- and seventeenth-century brick ornament, and from the English Gothic Revival of Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill. It was a romantic style, associated with ruins, chivalry and melancholy, and it suited country estates where landowners wanted buildings that looked picturesque in a landscape park.

For a memorial church, the style carried an extra charge. Gothic was the architecture of tombs, chantries and cathedrals in the imagination of the period, and its pointed, upward-straining forms read as solemn and aspiring at once. Izmailov's church uses that mood to frame an Orthodox interior dedicated to the Mother of God, a fitting choice for a monument to a wife.

Later history

A separate bell tower was added in the nineteenth century; sources disagree on whether it dates from 1869–71 or 1884. In the 1930s, under the anti-religious campaigns of the Soviet state, the church was closed (sources give 1937) and stripped. Over the following decades it served as a juvenile prison, a training site for demolition work and a garment factory, and the interior was badly damaged. The manor house nearby became a tuberculosis sanatorium.

The church was returned to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1989, and services resumed. It has since been restored. Reliefs on the building that include portraits of Izmailov and his wife are thought by historians to date from this modern restoration rather than from the 1780s, a reminder that what we see today is partly a reconstruction.

How it compares

The church belongs to a European family of buildings that use medieval forms for modern feeling. It invites comparison with true medieval Gothic, such as the Lichfield Cathedral (itself heavily restored in the nineteenth century) or the ruined parish church of Saint-Étienne-le-Vieux in Caen, and with Monet's dissolving views of Gothic stone in Rouen Cathedral in Full Sunlight. What sets Bykovo apart is the translation: Western Gothic ornament wrapped around the shape and rituals of an Orthodox church. For more, see Gothic Art.

Can you visit?

Yes. The church is an active Orthodox parish on the former Bykovo (Vorontsov-Dashkov) estate in the Ramensky district of Moscow Oblast and is open daily for worship and visitors. The neighboring manor house, also attributed to Bazhenov, stands empty. Visitors should dress as for any Orthodox church: covered shoulders and knees, and headscarves for women.