Blagovidova Nataliya G.
THE NEW-JERUSALEM MONASTERY AS A UNIQUE SPRITIAUL AND EDUCATIONAL CENTRE
Architecton: Proceedings of Higher Education №1 (41) March, 2013
The concept of the Russian Palestine was devised as an architectural and landscape embodiment of the Holy Land image, where all the main Palestinian relics would be restored, reminding one of the mundane life of Jesus Christ. The Russian Church would have obtained for many years to come a unique spiritual centre that would have enabled any pilgrim, however poor and uneducated, to see the incarnation of the main relics from the faraway Palestine as they stood here, surrounded with the native landscapes.
In the late 17th century, the Voskresensky Monastery (the Monastery of Resurrection) became the centre of spiritual culture with a library that boasted Russia’s richest collection of books including works of poetry and music. During the subsequent years, the Monastery was headed by well-educated abbots, authors of many a literary work, including “The Historical Description of the Voskresensky Monastery”.
Crowds of pilgrims came to the Monastery, and it was the monks’ duty to show them around the facility paying special attention to locations where the Palestinian church had been imitated; in other words, the monks had to provide what we now call guided tours. Archbishop Leonid founded one of Russia’s first church museums in the Voskresensky Monastery. Ever since its establishment, the museum in “New Jerusalem’ became the centre of archaeological, ethnographical and statistic studies of Moscow Region and other regions of Russia.
World War II drew a sharp line under the 300 years’ long history of ‘New Jerusalem’. The ensemble of the Monastery was purposefully destroyed. When retreating, the German engineers blew up the Cathedral of Resurrection. After a while restoration of the ensemble began. The revival of the ‘New Jerusalem’ museum also included active replenishment of its collections of paintings, and of hand-written and printed books. The ‘New Jerusalem’ museum takes part in arranging exhibitions and holds research conferences. The ‘New Jerusalem’ Monastery that was designed in the 17th century as a special centre of spiritual education has maintained this function over centuries, and is currently able to develop it further.
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