The Feast of the Assumption at the Kremlin
The cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God, consecrated on August 15, 1327, is erected in the historic center of Moscow. The building that is seen today is the work of a Venetian architect who has integrated Italian, Byzantine and Russian styles. The church, still functional, but more like a museum of icons, is witness to the greatest events in Russian history.
Moscow (AsiaNews) - The Russian Church will celebrate the feast of the Assumption of Mary, which in the East has the title of "Dormition of the Mother of God" on August 28, according to the usual distance between the Gregorian calendar and the ancient calendar Giuliano, still in force in many Orthodox Churches, including the one in Moscow. Despite this, in Moscow on August 15, there was still a celebration of the Dormition: 690 years ago, when the calendar was still the same for all the Churches, it was consecrated the Kremlin’s main cathedral and dedicated to the great mystery of Mary's union with her Son in glory.
If the Kremlin is the heart of Moscow and Russia as a whole, the cathedral of Dormition is its pulsating valve, through which the Russian soul flows. When the city was still just an oriental outpost of the Princes under the Tartar Yoke, one of them realized that its position could actually become crucial to the future of the country. Prince Ivan I was called "Kalita", meaning "sack of money" because he was able to take advantage of the opportunity by making Moscow the crossroads of all business and tax collections, then entrusted to Genoese merchants, the only ones who did not fear to their heads being cut off by the Mongol khan. Ivan Kalita decided to build a new church on the hill where he had fortified his residence, one of the many "cremines" of passage that would become the Kremlin par excellence. On August 15, 1327, the first metropolis of Moscow, Petr, consecrated the new cathedral and officially transferred his seat, which still had the title of Kiev. The new Holy Russia of Moscow was born.
The new church and the fortress were, however, quite deficient in terms of architecture, and 150 years later, now free from the slavery of the Tartars, the Russians decided, with great Prince Ivan III, to make it a symbol of a new dimension. An Empire that would save the world from Tartars and Saracens, and from any other enemy: the "Third Rome". Pope Paul II provided the best of gifts from "the first Rome", offering the Russian prince a Byzantine princess as a bride, Sofia Paleologa. In this way the pope hoped to convert Russia to Catholicism but ended up consolidating the idea that Moscow was the only true heir to Roman and Christian greatness. Along with the Byzantine ceremony and the double headed eagle, Sofia also brought an Italian engineer, Aristotele Fioravanti, who rebuilt the Kremlin and the cathedral of Dormition, mixing the elegance of the Venetian palaces and the austerity of domes and iconostasis, modeling the other historic church of Dormition, that of Vladimir, where 50 years earlier the painter Andrej Rublev worked. That extraordinary fusion of East and West became the prototype of all Russian cities and its cathedrals.
The sacred and symbolic Kremlin temple has witnessed all the great moments of Russian history. In 1547, in the presence of all the ambassadors of Europe, the coronation of the first Tsar of Russia, Ivan IV the Terrible, took place. In 1612 the Polish Jesuits celebrated the Latin liturgy in the name of the Pope, but the following year they were expelled from the Romanov dynasty. The head of the house, Patriarch Filaret, set the crown on the head of his son Michail, the first of the lineage extinct in the Revolution of 1917. From the bell tower in front of the cathedral, Napoleon watched the Moscow fire in 1812 that included his inevitable defeat. He looted the treasures of the church, as more than one century later the Bolsheviks would do, in an attempt to despoil all the churches in the Kremlin. Fortunately, they ended up making it a Historical Museum, after which in 1917 the last great Council of the Russian Church was held in the cathedral.
Throughout the Soviet years the cathedral was a display of icon, frequented by tourists who were often secretly nostalgic devotees, and prayed silently for Russia's rebirth from atheism. An adventurous Catholic bishop, Slovakian Pavol Hnilica, boasted of being able to celebrate Mass hiding in a corner of the church without being seen by the guards. In 1991, at the fall of communism, a solemn liturgy was finally celebrated by Patriarch Aleksij II.
Today, the main patriarchate cathedral in Moscow, rebuilt in the 1990s, is the great complex of the Church of Our Holy Savoir, on the riverfront near the Kremlin. The Dormition cathedral is still basically a museum, even though various rituals are regularly celebrated along with other churches in the cathedral square. After shaking off the "Soviet yoke", Russia is experiencing a new rebirth, seeking its greatness between East and West, beginning from the Kremlin, and the glorious Assumption of the Mother of God.
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