Description of the attraction
The Church of St. Gregory of Neocaesarea was built in the 15th century. Prince Vasily II of Moscow was at that time in captivity by the Tatars and made a vow that if he returned to Moscow, he would build a temple. He was released by the Tatars on the day of memory of the Wonderworker Gregory of Neocaesarea. The temple was built in honor of this saint. Later, it apparently burned down.
The stone church on this site was built during the reign of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich in 1662-1679 at the expense of Andrei Savinov, the czar's spiritual father. The church was built by architects Ivan, nicknamed Grasshopper and Karp, nicknamed Guba, famous masters of that time.
The temple is a powerful slender structure with five chapters. It is distinguished by a wonderful tiled frieze with a peacock eye pattern. The patterns are made by the best craftsman Stepan Polubes. The temple side-altars were built later. South chapel of St. George the Theologian was built in 1767, and the tomb of Andrei Savinov ended up there. The northern side-altar of Our Lady of Bogolyubskaya was built in 1834.
The tent-roofed bell tower, also decorated with tiles, has always been an important town-planning landmark of Zamoskvorechye. For the passage of pedestrians along Bolshaya Polyanka Street, an arch was made in the lower tier of the bell tower, since the temple protruded beyond the "red" line of the street.
In the 17th century, artists from Kostroma (G. Nikitin and others) and Pereslavl (P. Dunaev and others) were invited to paint the walls inside the church. Unfortunately, the frescoes they created have been lost. Icons for the iconostasis were painted by tsarist iconographers such as Simon Ushakov, G. Nikitin and a number of Yaroslavl masters. Several icons from the church have survived and are now in the collections of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.
Of the most significant events that this temple witnessed, two stand out - the wedding of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich with Natalya Kirillovna Naryshkina in 1671 and the baptism of baby Peter, the future emperor of Russia Peter the Great, in 1672.
