Is it true that the Novokuznetskaya metro station decorates benches from the blown up Cathedral of Christ the Savior?

In several collections of facts about the Moscow metro, there is a statement: before the explosion of the main Moscow cathedral, marble benches were made from there, which now decorate the platform of one of the stations. We checked whether this is really so.

The Cathedral of Christ the Savior was erected in the 19th century according to the project of architect Konstantin Tone. Under the Soviet regime, at this place they conceived the construction of the Palace of Soviets and in 1931 they blew up the cathedral. Later, the Moscow pool was built here, and in the 1990s the temple was restored. There are a lot of legends that the rich decoration of the cathedral was not destroyed with the building itself. For example, in the materials TASS, "Komsomolskaya Pravda" and the Orthodox magazine "Thomas" It is alleged that marble benches from the temple can be seen on the platform of the Novokuznetskaya metro station.

“Novokuznetskaya” began to be built in 1938, seven years after the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. According to the initial project of the spouses Ivan Taranov and Nadezhda Bykova, the interior of the station was to be made in a pseudo -classical style like the ancient Roman buildings. It did not work out to implement this idea - the war began, and the construction of the station was temporarily frozen. The construction resumed after the battle for Moscow, and the project was appropriately changed - now the decoration of the platform was supposed to glorify the resistance of the Soviet people during the war years.

Against the background of the rest of the design of Novokuznetsk, open in 1943, marble benches really stood out: they were decorated not by five -pointed stars or silhouettes of rifles, but by clusters of grapes and palm branches. Such a discrepancy gave rise to a legend: supposedly these beautiful benches were made not for the Moscow metro station in the 1930s, but for the main Moscow cathedral a few decades before. The earliest mention of this story that we managed to find on the Internet - publication 2008 on the website "Walks in Moscow".

When the version of the benches from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior on “Novokuznetsk” began to replicate many sites and tell dozens of Moscow guides, journalists and art historians decided to find out a genuine story. They could not find evidence in archives and museums and decided to contact the son of the authors of the Novokuznetsk project Andrei Taranov. He toldThat the benches were made according to his father’s drawings in 1938, and before installation at the station were stored in a warehouse in Cherkizov. They did not reduce them for a new design during the war - they decided that such a budget spending would be wrong. His version of the events of Taranov Jr. Repeated And in a later interview.

Like colleagues, we were not able to find documentary evidence that the benches on Novokuznetskaya were initially decorated with the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. There is a PASTVIEW website collection Pictures and drawings taken in different years in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior - on none of them are benches, similar to the fact that we now see at the metro station are not captured. The only thing that can connect the “Novokuznetsk” with the cathedral is the use of marble slabs removed from the walls of the temple in front of the explosion when decorating. About this told The architect Nadezhda Bykov, but emphasized that she did not have any facts in support of this theory.

Not true

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. https://moskvichmag.ru/lyudi/moskovskaya-dinastiya-taranovy-bykovy/
2. https://www.360cites.net/image/moscow-metro-novokuznetskaja-station-1
3. https://pastvu.com/p/430545