Description of the attraction
The Cathedral of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker is an active Orthodox church located in the Kirovsky district of the city of Kemerovo.
The history of the temple began back in 1846. There is a legend according to which a rich Tatar, crossing the Tom river, began to drown and asked for the salvation of the "Russian god". He swam near the place where the St. Nicholas Church is today, and subsequently ordered to build a church here. The first church was built of wood in 1846 and was a small single-altar temple, the second church - made of stone - was erected almost fifty years later. In 1919, the church was destroyed by red partisans, but three years later the parishioners, the so-called "renovationists", erected a new wooden church in the same place.
In 1925, St. Nicholas Church suffered the sad fate of most of the religious buildings of that time - the church was closed, and the building was turned into a granary. And only in 1945, at the numerous requests of the parishioners, the church was handed over to the community for an unlimited use. For a long time, Simeon Sorokuz was the permanent abbot of the church, and the church head Vasily Ponomarev also played a significant role in the revival of the St. Nicholas Church.
In 1970, a large-scale reconstruction of the church was carried out, as a result of which its area was increased by 64 square meters, the wooden walls were replaced with brickwork, and the laundry was rebuilt. The interior of the church was also updated - new floors were installed, the walls were plastered and painted, large icons were ordered from the artist N. Klyukovkin from Novosibirsk, the iconostasis and icon cases were gilded anew. The secondary reconstruction of the temple was carried out ten years later, during which the wooden building of the baptismal temples was replaced with a stone one. Later, on the territory of the Cathedral of Nicholas the Wonderworker, a two-story stone building for a Sunday school was built.
Today the Cathedral of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker is one of the main Orthodox shrines of the city of Kemerovo.
