THE PATRIARCHAL CHAMBERS AND THE CHURCH OF THE TWELVE APOSTLES

Description

Essentials about The Patriarchal Chambers and the Church of the Twelve Apostles in brief

The Patriarchal Chambers and the Church of the Twelve Apostles are an ensemble of buildings on the grounds of the Kremlin, consisting of a secular and a sacred structure. The palace and the church are located at the northern end of Cathedral Square, right next to the Cathedral of the Dormition. The Patriarchal Chambers and the Church of the Twelve Apostles served as a residential and working residence as well as the house church of the Moscow Patriarch until the 18th century. Today the building houses a museum with a wide exhibition of Russian Orthodox Church paraphernalia and everyday objects from the 16th and 17th centuries.

The history of The Patriarchal Chambers and the Church of the Twelve Apostles

The Patriarchal Chambers and the Church of the Twelve Apostles from the 14th to the 16th century

The first residence of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church on the territory of the Moscow Kremlin was built as early as 1325, even before the Kremlin fortress was rebuilt at the behest of the then reigning Grand Prince Ivan I Kalita. Metropolitan Peter at that time settled near the Cathedral of the Dormition, more precisely its predecessor building erected at the same time (1326-27), thus marking the beginning of the history of the Kremlin as the center of the spiritual life of Moscow. The original chambers were built of wood, as was usual. The first mention of stone metropolitan chambers in the Kremlin dates only from 1450, although this building probably did not remain standing for long. Until the late 16th century, when the title of patriarch was first introduced in the Russian Orthodox Church, several successor buildings fell victim to frequent fires and had to be rebuilt again and again.

The Patriarchal Chambers and the Church of the Twelve Apostles in the 17th century

The chambers preserved today were first built under Patriarch Nikon, who wanted to have a particularly representative palace built for his office in order to emphasize the high status of the Orthodox faith. For this purpose, Nikon received from the then Tsar Alexei I, in addition to the already existing Patriarch’s House, a plot of land adjacent to it, north of the Cathedral of the Dormition. The old chambers were demolished and the present palace was built on the whole plot. The construction, which lasted from 1653 to 1656, was led by the Russian architects Antip Konstantinov and Bashen Ogurzov, who had also built the Terem Palace for the Tsar’s family two decades earlier.

The new building surpassed the old chambers not only in its architecture and furnishings, but represented a novel combination of a residential building and a church structure. When viewed from Cathedral Square, the left half of the building represented the secular part, where the Patriarch’s living, working and reception rooms were located, while the right half – recognizable by the roof section closed off by five steeples – housed the Patriarch’s domestic church. Originally Nikon had this church consecrated to the Apostle Philip, only under one of Nikon’s successors – Patriarch Joachim – the church was consecrated to the Orthodox feast of the Twelve Apostles and received its present name. In the lower part of the church there was a passage portal, which has been preserved to this day, leading from the street to the patriarchal courtyard.

The Patriarchal Chambers and the Church of the Twelve Apostles in the 18th century

The palace served as the chambers of the Moscow Patriarch until 1721, when the Patriarchate was abolished again in the Russian Orthodox Church and the Church Council was taken over by the Holy Synod. The latter established one of its service premises in the former Patriarchal Palace shortly after. Large parts of the palace’s interior already served as a public museum of everyday Russian church life in the 17th century from the middle of the 18th century.

The Patriarchal Chambers and the Church of the Twelve Apostles in the 20th century

With the entry of the Bolshevik government into the Kremlin shortly after the October Revolution in 1917, both the former patriarchal residence and the church were closed by the state power. After the entire Kremlin was closed to public access in the 1920s, the Patriarch’s Chambers were also increasingly forgotten. It was not until the reopening of the Kremlin in 1955 and the establishment of many historical buildings and churches there as museums that the former Patriarchal Chambers were restored and also opened to visitors. They still fultill their main function as a museum today. A large number of the exhibits on display here are from other Kremlin buildings, including those destroyed in the 1920s and 1930s at the behest of the Soviet government.

The exhibition in the Patriarchal Chambers

Today, one enters the Patriarchal Chambers via a staircase that leads visitors directly to the exhibition rooms on the second floor. In the past, this floor was used by the Patriarch for receptions, audiences and meetings. The central part of the museum is the former room for ceremonial receptions, known as the Cross Chamber. This is a hall of about 280 square meters, whose furnishings, reproduced in their original state, are extremely magnificent and in some ways reminiscent of the Parade Hall of the nearby Palace of Facets. The cross vault of the hall has no additional supports in the form of columns or pillars and is painted with plant ornaments throughout. The hall served the Patriarch as a place for receptions, church meetings, Tsar’s audiences and other particularly important acts. From the Cross Chamber, richly decorated door portals lead to neighboring exhibition rooms, which also served mainly representative purposes in the 17th century, including, for example, the refectory or the former working cabinet of the Patriarch.

One of the most famous exhibits in the Cross Chamber is the former furnace, in which anointing oil for church rituals such as baptisms or anointings was produced every three to four years from 1763 until the beginning of the 20th century, always in the week of Lent before the Orthodox Easter. It was the only place in all of Russia where this process took place. The finished anointing oil was distributed from here to Orthodox places of worship throughout Russia and also in Orthodox foreign countries. This tradition continues in the Russian Orthodox Church to this day, although the oil is no longer produced in the Kremlin, but in Moscow’s Donskoi Monastery. Next to the old furnace, whose richly ornamented and icon-decorated surround takes on considerable dimensions, are historic cauldrons for storing the anointing oil, also very artistically made.

Also on display in the Cross Chamber, as well as in the neighboring refectory, are a large number of original objects from the household of the former Patriarchal Chambers, as well as from the tsar’s court. Particularly representative pieces of tableware, some of which are made of precious metals, various unique pieces of clockwork, splendid pieces of clothing or icon mounts and other exhibits from the 17th and 18th centuries can be seen. In the former study of the patriarch the interior of the 17th century was recreated, however, original pieces of furniture from the patriarchal palace of that time have not been preserved.

The exhibition in the Church of the Twelve Apostles

The Church of the Twelve Apostles is now also part of the museum in the former Patriarchal Chambers, but much of the original 17th century furnishings have not been preserved here. Many of the historically valuable utensils that have not been lost were moved to the Kremlin Armory in the 20th century, where some of them are still on display today. This is also true for items from the former sacristy of the Patriarchal Chambers, which can also be seen in the Armory today. The five-tiered iconostasis, richly decorated with carved ornaments, now in the Church, was transferred here in 1929 from the Ascension Monastery, one of the two Kremlin monasteries destroyed by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s. The two dozen icons hanging on the walls of the church were also originally from other places of worship. In the early 1990s, the Church of the Twelve Apostles, like the other major houses of worship in the Kremlin, was returned to the Moscow Patriarchate. Once a year, on the holiday of the Twelve Apostles on July 13, services are held here again.