Description of the attraction
The Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a five-domed white-stone Orthodox church located on the Old Trade (now Krasnoarmeiskaya) Square in the city of Kargopol, Arkhangelsk Region. The church building is diminutive and graceful in comparison with other local temples. The temple looks very elegant thanks to its exquisite decoration.
The Mother of God Christmas Church is considered the earliest of the 17th century buildings that have survived in Kargopol. It began to be built instead of a wooden one in 1678 (according to other sources in 1680) by the care of the Kargopol merchants Kliment and Andrey Pometyaev, and in gratitude to the brothers, the northern and southern side-altars in the name of Saints Clement and Andrew were added to the temple. The construction was completed in 1682. The bell tower was completed on the western side only in 1844 at the expense of merchants Andrey and Ivan Nasonov.
The only parish in the entire Kargopol land (on the territory of two present districts: Kargopol and Nyandomsky) that operated during the years of Soviet power, thereby preserving the continuity of traditions.
The Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a one-apse, pillarless church with five domes. It has two symmetrical side-chapels, slightly lowered in relation to the main room, set in the north-western and south-western corners of the building. In plan it is baptized, stretched from east to west. The tall four is completed by elegant domes of the heads on slender patterned drums. Patterned gilded crosses are a remake that is not typical of Kargopol artistic traditions. From all sides, various-sized annexes adjoined the temple: apses, side-altars, a refectory. There is a wide porch on the west side.
The church is distinguished by the richness of stone carving: rhombuses, denticles, rollers adorn the side-altars, apses, and porch. Also striking is the variety of decorative elements of window frames, placed not in rows, but as if running up obliquely from the lower to the upper corner from the north and going down from the south. Each white-stone, intricately carved clypeus is distinguished by its uniqueness and inimitable beauty: one has a lancet end, the next has a serrated end, the third has a keeled end, the fourth has a semicircular end, and so on. The Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a series of monuments of a unique local style, called "Kargopol pattern". It is not for nothing that this church has long been popularly called "marvelous".
According to G. V. Alferova, the prototype of the Church of the Mother of God was the Moscow township temples. In addition, she points to the unusualness of the Kargopol stone architecture in the presence of low, cozy interiors of this church, which resemble the "intimate interiors" characteristic of wooden temples.
Now the church is one of two parish churches in the city. Archpriest Boris (Korobeinik) acts as the parish rector.
