Is it true that the Novokuznetskaya metro station is decorated with benches from the bombed 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 removed from there, which now adorn the platform of one of the stations. We checked whether this is actually true.

The Cathedral of Christ the Savior was built in the 19th century according to the design of the architect Konstantin Ton. Under Soviet rule, they planned to build the Palace of the Soviets on this site, and in 1931 the cathedral was blown up. Later, the Moscow swimming pool was built here, and the temple was restored in the 1990s. There are many legends that the rich decoration of the cathedral was not destroyed along with the building itself. For example, in materials TASS, "Komsomolskaya Pravda" and Orthodox magazine "Thomas" it is claimed that marble benches from the temple can be seen on the platform of the Novokuznetskaya metro station.

Construction of Novokuznetskaya began in 1938, seven years after the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. According to the original project of the spouses Ivan Taranov and Nadezhda Bykova, the interior decoration of the station was to be made in a pseudo-classical style similar to ancient Roman buildings. This idea failed to be realized - the war began, and the construction of the station was temporarily frozen. Construction resumed after the Battle of Moscow, and the design was changed accordingly - now the decoration of the platform was supposed to glorify the resilience of the Soviet people during the war.

Compared to the rest of the decoration of Novokuznetskaya, opened in 1943, the marble benches really stood out: they were decorated not with five-pointed stars or silhouettes of rifles, but with bunches of grapes and palm branches. This discrepancy gave rise to a legend: supposedly these beautiful benches were made not for a Moscow metro station in the 1930s, but for the main Moscow cathedral several decades earlier. The earliest mention of this story that we could find on the Internet is publication 2008 on the “Walks around Moscow” website.

When the version about the benches from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior on Novokuznetskaya began to be replicated by many websites and told by dozens of Moscow tour guides, journalists and art historians decided to find out the real story. They could not find evidence in archives and museums and decided to turn to the son of the authors of the Novokuznetskaya project, Andrei Taranov. He told, that the benches were made according to his father’s drawings in 1938, and before installation at the station they were stored in a warehouse in Cherkizovo. They did not remodel them with a new design during the war years - they decided that spending the budget in such a way would be wrong. Taranov Jr.’s version of events repeated and in a later interview.

Like our colleagues, we were unable to find documentary evidence that the benches at Novokuznetskaya originally decorated the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The PastView website has collection photographs and drawings taken in different years in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior - none of them depict benches similar to those we now see at the metro station. The only thing that can connect Novokuznetskaya with the cathedral is the use of marble slabs removed from the walls of the temple before the explosion in the decoration. About this told architect Nadezhda Bykova, but emphasized that she does not have any facts to support 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.360cities.net/image/moscow-metro-novokuznetskaja-station-1
3. https://pastvu.com/p/430545