The Church of St. John the Evangelist in Bronnaya Sloboda, in Tverskoy Boulevard, dates back to 1615; it was founded under the Romanov dynasty. It used to keep an ancient icon of St. John the Evangelist, which was donated by Tsar Mikhail.
Bronnaya Sloboda was called so after the old settlement, which in those times occupied the area, of "bronniki", master gunsmiths who produced weapons and armour. Later, the word "bronniki" was used to mean only those masters who produced armour: helmets and chain mail.
The residents of the Sloboda being rich, in 1652–1665, by the efforts of the parishioners, a new, large, beautiful, stone Church was erected, which survived to our day. The altars: the main altar of the Apostle John the Evangelist, and the side-altars of St. Nicholas the Wonder-Worker (a standalone building with a refectory and an altar; consecrated in 1695) and of St. Mitrophan of Voronezh (consecrated in 1838, has never been reconstructed).
In 1740–1742, a new three-tier bell tower was built (on the site of the old one).
After construction and repair works were done in the early 1840s, the Church was consecrated, in 1842. The Church's consecration was attended by St. Philaret of Moscow.
The Church is a small suburban church. It is a double-height church, with a rectangular plan, stretching from the north to the south. . It has five domes. At its centre, there is a lantern drum resting on a cloistered vault, with additional barrel vaults supporting blind side domes in the corners. A double-height, rectangular refectory adjoins the Church from the west; it features architraves with broken pediments, typical of the Naryshkin Baroque style. The Church features a three-part altar area. It is crowned by a spire resting on a two-tier octahedral drum. The refectory is adjoined by a bell tower (the narthex being its lower level), in the Baroque style and featuring light, elegant moulding.
The 1922 expropriation of the Church's valuables was watched by the poet Osip Mandelstam and his wife; this is how she described what she had seen: "We entered the church, but nobody stopped us. An elderly and dishevelled priest was all trembling with fear, with large tears running down his face as church cloths were torn off and icons were crashed on the floor. The people performing the expropriation were noisily doing anti-religious propaganda, accompanied by old women weeping and the crowd jeering, being entertained by such an unseen spectacle. The Church being part of the superstructure (according to Karl Marx), it was being destroyed together with the former basis."
In 1932, Pushkin Moscow City Chamber Theatre officially asked for the Church to be demolished; the architect Dmitry Sukhov spoke against that. The Church was shut down in 1933. Only its domes and the drum itself were destroyed. Then, the Church was occupied by theatre workshops, a warehouse for stage sets, and a woodworking shop.
In the early 1970s, the Church started being slowly restored: the bell tower was repaired and the cross was reconstructed based on a photograph from Nikolay Naidyonov's album. However, the construction works were often interrupted, now due to a lack of funds, then of construction workers. Mikhail Suslov, the Communist Party's chief ideologist, lived in Bolshaya Bronnaya Street, close to the Church. According to a story, once upon a time, while having a walk not so far from his block of flats, he noticed a dilapidated church that had been under restoration for a long time, with no end to the works in sight. A single call made by him to the Ministry of Culture sufficed for the funds, the construction materials and the workers to be found. Unfortunately, with Suslov's intervention being limited to only that single call, the restoration works were suspended once again.
As late as the 1990s, the Church's building was a scary sight, with wide cracks spanning its entire wall. It was discovered that after a hole had been dug at the refectory's western wall, to examine the foundation, in 1985, water had gotten under the foundation, resulting in those deep cracks. At that time, it seemed that the Church's state was hopeless...
Since the Church was handed back to the ecclesiastical authorities in 1992, church services have been performed there again.
During the Easter of 1993, church services restarted in St. Nicolas side-altar.
By the Easter of 1995, the Church's building was completely free of woodworking shops. The virtually entire reconstruction of the Church was done using charitable funds allocated by Incombank or donated by organisations of the parishioners. The Church and its side-altar were consecrated with a pontifical liturgy on 21 May 1999. A Sunday school for children has been opened at the Church.
The Church was built in 1774 in Karacharovo Village, beyond Pokrovskiye Gate, on the Kolomenka River, instead of two wooden tented-roof churches, the Church of Three Saints and Our Lady of the Sign Church.
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The Chapel of Andronikov Monastery of the Saviour in Voronya Street is the old name of the chapel. Voronya Street was situated in place of Voronya Sloboda.
It was a Russian custom to build chapels where people said their farewells (Rus.: proshchatsya) to leaving travellers. Proshcha is a traditional name for many chapels situated by town gates o...
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