Church of Christ the Saviour

Moving west along the river from yesterday's spot we come to another golden domed beauty, namely Church of Christ the Saviour. This shot was taken from the pedestrian bridge that crosses the river to the south of the church.

The original cathedral was planned by Alexander 1 in 1812 as a memorial to the sacrifices of the Russian people after Bonaparte retreated from Moscow. Work did not start on the cathedral though until 1839 and it was finally finished and unveiled in 1860 by which time Nicolas I (who was profoundly Orthodox) had succeeded his brother and the design had been changed to be less Neoclassical and more based on the Hagia Sophia in Turkey. The position of the cathedral was also changed as the original plan had been to build on the hill to the west of Moscow but the site was deemed to be not secure enough and so the cathedral was moved to be nearer the Kremlin.

Many churches were destroyed under state atheism in the USSR and after the death of Lenin the central and famous site of the cathedral was chosen by Stalin to be the ideal place for a monument to socialism. It was suggested that the golden domes of the Church of Christ the Saviour were a luxury and that the gold would be better used contributing to the economic development of the country. On December 5 1931 the cathedral was blown up and destroyed.

Stalin's plan to build a monument to socialism however, did not materialise due to lack of funds and the outbreak of war. The site remained a unused until it was transformed into the world's largest outdoor swimming pool under Nikita Krushchev.

In February 1990 the Russian Orthodox Church received permission to rebuild the cathedral. It is thought that approximately one million Muscovites contributed to the rebuilding fund and constuction began in 1994. The completed cathedral, an exact replica of the original, was consecrated on 19 August 2000. It is the tallest Orthodox Christian Church in the world at 105 metres tall and it is said that it can accommodate 10,000 people.

Boris Yeltsin laid in state in the cathedral after his death in 2007 and the church was in the news more recently as it was here in February 2012 that the Pussy Riots staged a performance which led to three of their members being arrested. Two of them remain in prison.