Description of the attraction
The Church of the Life-Giving Trinity was built in 1628-51. by order of the merchant Grigory Nikitnikov on the territory of his estate. Earlier on this place stood the wooden church of Nikita the Martyr in Glinishchi, which burned down in one of the Moscow fires.
The Trinity Church in Nikitniki is an interesting architectural monument in the style of "Russian pattern". This temple later became a model for the construction of many Moscow churches. The slender proportions of the central part of the church are crowned with five domes, to the base of which there are three rows of kokoshniks. The central chapter is light.
From the northeast and southeast, there are two side-altars, north and south. The north aisle has a refectory, as does the main temple. The hipped bell tower is located in the north-western corner of the temple and is connected to the refectory by a covered gallery - the porch. This entire part of the temple resembles the mansions of ancient Russian wooden architecture. The entrance to the church is decorated with a hipped porch. Such "mansion" porches were later added to more ancient temples. The covered gallery and the porch, the platbands of the two main windows of the southern facade resemble the decor of the Kremlin Terem Palace. The southern side-altar of the temple was the family tomb of the Nikitnikovs and did not have an entrance from the street, but communicated only with the temple.
The well-preserved multicolored mural painting of the temple with many everyday details was made, presumably, by Kremlin masters (Y. Kazanets, S. Ushakov, etc.), and later became a model for painting churches of the 17th-18th centuries in cities such as Yaroslavl, Rostov, Kostroma and Vologda. These same Kremlin masters later painted icons for the iconostasis of the church.
In 1904, the side-altar of the Georgian Icon of the Mother of God was consecrated in the basement, after which the temple received its second name.
The temple was closed in 1920 and houses a branch of the State Historical Museum. In 1923, a museum of paintings by Simon Ushakov was opened in the church. In 1941-45. the museum was evacuated and reopened after the war only in 1963.
At the moment, services have been resumed in the temple.
