About the white-stone temples of ancient Russia, I would like to start with the monument that is least known to most tourists, which captures the soul almost stronger than many Suzdal buildings. This is the ancient St. George Cathedral in the city of Yuryev-Polsky.
Having rounded the new brick cathedral on the right, built in 1907-1909, we stop in involuntary amazement in front of a strange and beautiful, surprising and naive, one of a kind building. The huge bulbous head and its wide heavy drum seemed to crushed and forced to spread out to the sides and bend the squat cube of the temple with heavy apses. After the snow-white buildings of Vladimir of the 12th century, we are surprised by his gray-greenish, silvery-yellow color, as if centuries have imposed their severe patina on its walls. After the harmonious decorative system of the Dimitrievsky Cathedral, we are struck by the bizarre chaos of sculptures. The walls are, as it were, paved with them. Beasts and monsters, saints and angels, scraps of fantastic stone garlands seized by the mouths of lion masks, and fragments of the finest patterns form a mysterious mosaic. She looks like a giant stone puzzlean intense secret that imperiously fetters our thought. These are the first impressions experienced by everyone who sees the St. George Cathedral for the first time.
The small Vladimir town of Yuryev-Polskaya was founded and named after himself in 1152 by Prince Yury Dolgoruky. In the XII-XIV centuries, Yuryev was the center of a small inheritance, which since 1212 belonged to Prince Svyatoslav Vsevolodovich, the grandson of Yuri Dolgoruky. "Provincial" by the standards of Vladimir-Suzdal Russia, Yuriev could not, of course, be compared in terms of artistic wealth with the main Zalessky cities. The city has the only pearl of ancient Russian architecture, but this monument leaves many other buildings far behind. We are talking about the famous St. George Cathedral. This, according to N. N. Voronin, "strange and beautiful, amazing and naive" construction is one of a kind.
It is believed that the St. George Cathedral became a monument to the victory won in 1221 by Prince Yuri Svyatoslavich over the Volga Bulgars. During this campaign, Nizhny Novgorod was founded.
On the site of the current St. George Cathedral, back in 1152, Yuri Dolgoruky built a small white-stone church, dedicating it to his heavenly patron George the Victorious. In 1230, Svyatoslav Vsevolodovich ordered to destroy the grandfather's building, as it “dilapidated and broke”, and in its place in 1230-1234 St. George's Cathedral was built, which became the pinnacle of Vladimir-Suzdal architecture and the last white-stone building before the Mongol-Tatar invasion.
Promotional video:
The top - it is the top. Neither before nor after has anyone surpassed this masterpiece of unprecedented beauty, although there have been attempts to repeat it. So, the first Moscow Assumption Cathedral, built in the Kremlin in 1326, was an imitation of the cathedral in Yuryev-Polsky. But it was not enough to build a similar temple - there were no craftsmen who could at least partially repeat the white-stone pattern that covered the walls of the St. George Church from top to bottom with a solid carpet!
Much has been written and said about the carving of the St. George Cathedral. Suffice it to say that her artistic motifs until the 19th-20th centuries inspired masters of wooden "blind" carving, which adorned and continues to decorate the architraves and cornices of wooden houses.
… Bizarre images of animals, birds, plants: lions with "flourishing" tails, geese with woven necks. And everything is in a line, like on an embroidered towel, everything is smart, fun, festive. Vladimir Monomakh, the grandfather of Andrei Bogolyubsky, wrote in his "Teachings": "Beasts of different personalities, both the bird and the fish, are decorated with Your craft, Lord! All the same, God gave it for a man's land, for food, for fun. " And this "different beast", and magical birds, and fantastic creatures - everything created by God glorifies the Creator in the sparkling white stone carving of St. George's Cathedral.
White-stone carving intertwines with a continuous pattern not only the planes of the walls, but also all the architectural details - columns, capitals, arcature belt, portals. The figures of people, animals and mythical monsters are interspersed with bizarre floral ornaments, as a result, the cathedral covered with stone lace turns into an intricate figured block carved from solid stone. The whole building looks magnificent and solemn.
Unfortunately, in its original form the cathedral has not survived to this day, and it is impossible to see its original beauty: in the 1460s, the top of the cathedral collapsed. The southern facade of the temple suffered the most - it was destroyed almost entirely. The north facade was almost intact. In 1471, the architect Vasily Ermolin, the first Russian master restorer who restored churches in Vladimir, was sent from Moscow to Yuriev to restore the cathedral. Ermolin faced an extremely difficult task: he had not only to recreate the temple, but to recreate it so that the carved figured blocks again formed a solid stone pattern, united by a common idea. And this is taking into account the fact that there were no drawings and drawings of the temple, and many blocks were destroyed as a result of the collapse!
St. George's Cathedral. Reconstruction by D. P. Sukhov.
St. George's Cathedral. Reconstruction by N. N. Voronin.
St. George's Cathedral. Reconstruction by G. K. Wagner.
St. George's Cathedral. Reconstruction by A. V. Stoletov.
St. George's Cathedral. Reconstruction of S. V. Zagraevsky.
In fact, Ermolin had to solve the "stone crossword". We must pay tribute to the master - he did the best he could. He collected and restored large fragments of the building, in particular the north portal. But, of course, he could not "assemble" the cathedral in its former form. As a result, Yermolin reveted the facades with carved stones in complete disarray, and put some of the carved blocks on the new masonry of the walls.
Vasily Yermolin re-folded the vaults of the church, but he failed to achieve the former proud solemnity of the cathedral. In its current form, St. George's Cathedral seems massive and heavy, as if growing into the ground. A huge bulbous head and a wide heavy drum press on the already squat cubic volume of the temple. Despite the seeming massiveness, the temple is very small and completely retains the dimensions of the original building of 1152 - the time of Yuri Dolgoruky.
Against the background of a bizarre and lush plant pattern on the walls of St. George's Cathedral, you can see the masks of warriors and maidens, figures of lions and centaurs, griffins and sirins. Among the stone reliefs of the St. George Cathedral, there was a place for the portrait of the Prince of Yuryev Svyatoslav Vsevolodovich, during whose reign the cathedral was built. And on one of the stones the inscription "Baku (n)" was found. It is believed that Bakun (Avvakum) is the name of the master, the chief sculptor of the cathedral, who headed a brigade of carvers.
St. George's Cathedral is a typically "princely" temple, and its white-stone patterns only enhance its "worldly" appearance. There is no such ethereality that distinguishes the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl. The meaning of the carved decoration of the St. George Cathedral outgrows the boundaries of religious and dynastic ideology and extends to the entire Vladimir land. It is not for nothing that many researchers see portraits of the warriors of Prince Svyatoslav in the images of warriors, in the folklore figures of fairytale monsters - the semi-pagan attitude of the people, and the lush plant-animal pattern is probably intended to symbolize the wealth of Rus Zalesskaya. The images of St. George's Cathedral fully serve as an illustration of the "Word about the death of the Russian land" created approximately in the same years: "O light-light and red-decorated Russian land …".
Already the ancient Russian chroniclers were interested in the question of who created the St. George Cathedral. One of them expressed the opinion that Prince Svyatoslav Vsevolodovich himself was the author and builder of the cathedral. Modern researchers tend to believe that the prince really took a great part in the development of the idea of this architectural masterpiece.
15 The Vladimir Bishop Mitrofan, who was burnt alive by the Tatars in 1238 in the Assumption Cathedral of Vladimir, also played a significant role in the creation of the cathedral. Mitrofan was an outstanding personality, a man of wide culture, an intelligent politician and patron of the arts. Apparently, it was he who developed the program of the amazing carving of the St. George Cathedral. Her plots reveal excellent knowledge not only of patristic literature, but also of the works of Russian spiritual writers - "Words about Law and Grace" by Metropolitan Hilarion, "Words for the Ascension" by Kirill Turovsky, etc.
There is information that a master from the Volga Bulgaria also "had a hand" in the construction of the temple, although the cathedral itself was built in full accordance with the traditions of Vladimir-Suzdal architecture. It is characteristic that such a temple could not have arisen earlier, since for this the masters simply did not have enough experience. And only the rapid creative growth of Russian architects and stone carvers, who absorbed the experience of their predecessors, the best examples of Russian and foreign art, made it possible to create a stone fairy tale of St. George's Cathedral in Yuryev.
A careful study of the creative handwriting of stone carvers made it possible to establish that two artels of craftsmen took part in the creation of the white-stone carving of the St. George Cathedral: one, 12 people in number, carved high relief figures, and the second, from 18 to 24 people, made a floral ornament.
St. George's Cathedral is called the swan song of Vladimir-Suzdal architecture. Two years later, Batu's hordes fell upon Russia, and this song was cut off forever. And who can say what other heights the Vladimir masters would have reached if it were not for the "trouble from the nasty" that came in those years …
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Sibved comment
It can be seen that during the restoration, the blocks were laid on the solution, and initially they were tightly fitted with each other. Either it is GPB, casting. The quality of many ornamental elements speaks for this. But the restorers worked on a lot during the restoration.
Dare even to this opinion. This is a pagan temple, which was built before the flood that destroyed Tartaria, weakened Muscovy, Europe. Proof: this mammoth (an elephant with curly-haired girls):
Yet. How a strong stone structure could be destroyed almost to the ground, so that it was then assembled as a Lego constructor?
And a little about our white stone:
White blocks in the foundation of Kitay-Gorod.
It's plastered now.
Photo 2009 by tanyacher. The wall behind the Metropol Hotel. Below are white blocks, not bricks.
The Kremlin was also restored after the flood. But the source (or technology for obtaining GPB) of the blocks was no longer (material remained under the clay layer) - they began to build from bricks (based on clay).