Donskoy Monastery

Donskoy was founded in 1591 on the site where an army camped before a Crimean Tatar force withdrew from Moscow, and it grew into a walled monastery with twelve towers and two cathedrals - the Small of 1593 and the Great of the 1680s and 90s in Moscow baroque. Its necropolis is one of the most complete surviving noble cemeteries in Russia, with Golitsyns, Dolgorukovs and Naryshkins under carved eighteenth and nineteenth-century monuments, along with the writer Sumarokov, the architect Bove, and later Solzhenitsyn, buried here in 2008. The unusual holding is architectural salvage: when Moscow churches were demolished in the 1920s and 30s, high reliefs and stonework were removed and stored at Donskoy, including six large marble reliefs from the first Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which are now mounted along the monastery's southern wall - fragments of a building destroyed in 1931.

History

The monastery was founded in 1591 to mark Moscow's deliverance from an attack by the Crimean Khan Kazy-Girey, on the spot where Boris Godunov's mobile fortress and a field church with the icon Our Lady of the Don had stood. It received rich donations from 1678, was raised to an archimandrite's seat in 1683, and from 1711 the vault of the Great Cathedral held burials of Georgian tsarevichs of the Bagrationi family and Mingrelian dukes of the Dadiani family (Wikipedia, Donskoy Monastery).

The main sights

• The necropolis - noble tombs, Sumarokov, Bove and Solzhenitsyn.
• The salvaged reliefs - marble panels from the cathedral demolished in 1931, on the wall.
• The two cathedrals - the 1593 Small and the Moscow baroque Great of the 1680s.
• The walls - a fortified circuit with twelve towers around the complex.

When to go

May to September. One to two hours. It is an active monastery with dress rules and quiet expected.

Good to know

An active religious house - dress rules apply, and the necropolis is a cemetery, not a park. Photography is restricted in the churches. Some buildings are closed. The salvaged reliefs are unlabelled in places and need looking for.

Nearby

Gorky Park is north; central Moscow is beyond it.

Key facts