Description of the attraction
In Moscow, the temple of Sophia the Wisdom of God is located on the Sophia embankment, only the stone embankment was built in the first half of the 19th century, and the first Sophia temple appeared at the end of the 15th century. That, the first wooden building stood slightly away from the place where the present temple is located.
The first mention of that church dates back to 1493: the church was honored with an entry in the documents by the fact that that year it burned down in another Moscow fire that raged in the District. Three years later, Ivan III ordered to demolish all the remaining houses opposite the Kremlin and at the same time forbade the construction of new buildings there. Instead of residential buildings, a royal garden was laid out on this site, around which settlements began to appear, inhabited by gardeners and other servants who tended the royal fruit and berry lands. Sloboda began to be called Gardeners - Lower, Middle, Upper. In the 17th century, gardeners began to settle on the territory of the garden itself, towards the end of the century they built a stone church of Sophia the Wisdom of God there.
In a fire in 1812, the church suffered little damage and was quickly rebuilt. In the second half of the 19th century, instead of the old dilapidated bell tower, they began to build a new one designed by the architect Nikolai Kozlovsky. The next renovation of the temple took place in the first decade of the twentieth century after a great flood.
In the early years of Soviet power, church values were confiscated as part of a campaign to help the starving. But the temple itself was closed only in the 30s, and in the 20s its abbot even made attempts to repair the building of the temple and renew its painting. In the late 1920s, Father Alexander was arrested, and three years later the church was also closed. The confiscated Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God was transferred to the Tretyakov Gallery for safekeeping, and is now there.
After the closure, the building of the former church housed the union of atheists, the club of the plant "Red Torch", and the building was also used as a residential building and as a laboratory of the Institute of Steel and Alloys. In the 60s, the building was recognized as an architectural monument, and in the following decades, restoration work was carried out in it. In the 90s, the temple was returned to the Russian Orthodox Church, but services in it began to be held only at the beginning of this century.
