Naval Cathedral in Kronstadt
| Naval Cathedral of Saint Nicholas in Kronstadt |
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| Basic information | |
| Geographic coordinates | 59°59′30″N 29°46′39″E / 59.99166°N 29.77750°ECoordinates: 59°59′30″N 29°46′39″E / 59.99166°N 29.77750°E |
| Affiliation | Russian Orthodox |
| Municipality | Kronstadt |
| State | Russia |
| Province | Saint Petersburg |
| Year consecrated | 1913 |
| Ecclesiastical or organizational status | Stauropegial |
| Status | Operational (on special occasions only) |
| Heritage designation | Federal listed building |
| Architectural description | |
| Architect(s) |
Vasily Kosyakov (lead architect) Georgy Kosyakov (interiors, artwork) |
| Architectural style | Late Neo-Byzantine |
| Groundbreaking | 1903 |
| Completed | 1913 |
| Specifications | |
| Length | 83.2 metres (273 ft) |
| Width | 64 metres (210 ft) |
| Height (max) | 70.6 metres (232 ft) |
| Dome(s) | One |
| Dome dia. (outer) | 26.7 metres (88 ft) |
The Naval cathedral of Saint Nicholas in Kronstadt is a Russian Orthodox cathedral built in 1903–1913 as the main church of the Russian Navy and dedicated to all fallen seamen. The cathedral was closed in 1929, was converted to a cinema, a House of Officers (1939) and a museum of the Navy (1980).
The Russian Orthodox Church reinstalled the cross on the main dome in 2002 and served the first Divine Liturgy in the cathedral in 2005. In 2013, the Patriarch of Russia, with Prime Minister Dmitriy Medvedev and his spouse attending, conducted the ceremony of grand reconsecration in the now fully restored cathedral.
The first Orthodox church in Kronstadt was built in 1728–31. The wooden church remained the main place of worship in Russia's largest naval base until 1840, when the counterweights balancing the church bells broke through the rotting floors and seriously damaged the belltower structure. Emperor Nicholas I personally ordered the closure of the unsafe church and it was demolished in 1841. For the next half century worship occurred in temporary locations — in hospitals, barracks and even rented private houses; a temporary wooden church built in 1861 was inadequate for the ten thousand Kronstadt seamen from the start. Numerous Navy requests for construction funding were turned down or simply left unanswered, despite the fact that the cost of building a large contemporary cathedral (200 to 500 thousand roubles) was less than 10% of a pre-dreadnought battleship’s cost (RUB4 to 6 million).
Construction management, extremely centralized until the reign of Alexander II, was gradually decentralized in the 1880s–1890s. The right to initiate individual construction projects passed from the Emperor himself to imperial ministers and department chiefs. In 1896 admiral Pavel Tyrtov, director of the Imperial Russian Navy Ministry, started preparations to build a cathedral in Kronstadt in earnest. Tyrtov insisted that the cathedral be built on the site identified nearly two centuries earlier by Peter I and reasoned that it should not cost more than the new Kharkov cathedral (200,000 roubles).
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