Holy Trinity Church, Orthodox church in Vyazma, Russia.
Holy Trinity Church is a small, columnless Orthodox cathedral with three apses, crowned by a pyramid of kokoshniks and a slender onion dome. A wide refectory and a massive three-tier bell tower (46 m) built in classicist forms with Russian-style elements adjoin it. The bell tower's onion domes are made of narrow vertical slices, and the refectory holds a fragment of a classicist iconostasis from the Catherine Church.
A wooden church dedicated to St Nicholas stood here by 1015 and became the cathedral of the Vyazma principality in 1239. Boris Godunov had it rebuilt in 1597–1598, Polish troops under Żółkiewski destroyed it in 1610, and Tsar Michael restored it in 1635, renaming it for the Holy Trinity after the Treaty of Polyanovka. The stone cathedral was built in 1674–1676 with funds from Tsar Alexei, and a new bell tower followed in 1850.
The cathedral's name changed from St Nicholas to Holy Trinity after the 1634 Polyanovka Peace was signed on Trinity Sunday. The Iveron Icon of the Mother of God, brought from Moscow in 1765 by the Kalashnikov brothers, was credited with saving Vyazma from plague; a chapel was dedicated to it in 1773. A dove descends through a round opening between the royal doors and the Last Supper image.
The site is walkable from central Vyazma and sits on a raised position visible from across the city. Visitors should keep in mind this is an active place of worship, so appropriate dress and calm behavior are important.
The bell tower that collapsed in 1836 was never rebuilt in its old form; its bricks were used for a chapel at the Smolensk Bridge, later destroyed by the Bolsheviks in the 1930s. The present four-tier bell tower dates from 1850.
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