Sergiev Posad
The city grew up around the Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra Monastery, established around 1340 by St. Sergius of Radonezh . This monastery has been the single most important spiritual center in Russia for well over 600 years, and today is a working monastery, Seminary, Theological Academy and place of pilgrimage.
After the end of the wars agains Tartars and the victory over the kingdoms of Kazan and Astrakhan, the tsar Ivan IV (The Terrible), who had a particular veneration for St. Sergius of Radonezh, bagan building a large and beautiful church on the grounds of the Holy Trinity St. Sergius Lavra dedicated to the Dormition (Assumption) of the Mother God (Virgin Mary), a copy of the main cathedral of Moscow Kremlin. This impressive big church with beautiful cupolas (domes) had been on construction about 26 years (1559-1585) and was finished only after the death of the first Russian tsar.
The maginificent frescoes of this Cathedral were created in 1684 (in 1 century after the building was erected) by 35 painters in a 100 days (about 3 moths). The frescoes cover the area of 500 square meters and some of them you can see on right and left colums on this picture. On the background here you can see very tall, 5-tier iconostasis (a screen with icons deviding the sanctuary from nave) which consists of 76 icons dated back to the 16th-17th centuries. The celebrated seventeeth-century painter Simon Ushakov, the royal icon painter, took part in the creation of the iconostasis.
In the Dormition Cathedral there are two shrines with the holy relics of St. Filaret (Drozdov, 1867), placed near left column, and St. Innokenty (Veniaminov, 1879), placed near right column, Metropolitans of Moscow.
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