Church of the Nativity (Krokhino)

The two-story Church of the Nativity of Christ with St. Nicholas and Peter and Paul’s chapels and a bell tower was erected at the expense of the parishioners and was built from 1788 to 1820 . In the lower, warm floor there was a winter temple, in the upper two-light - summer. The porch was added in the 2nd half of the 19th century.

The brick, whitewashed plaster building is designed in the style of late regional baroque. The three-part longitudinal-axial composition “ship” consists of a one-domed church of the “ octagon on four ” type, rectangular in plan of the refectory and four-story pillar-shaped bell tower, surrounded on three sides by a two-story porch ^[1] . The church had a two-story faceted altar with uniform planes of faces for the winter church on the first floor and the summer one on the second, the apse ended with a curly roof with a small faceted dome. The exterior decor is flat and has a hard pattern. The building was surrounded by a low through fence with three-part gates ^[1] .

Krokhinskaya church was the architectural dominant of the entire surrounding landscape.

In the altar part of the temple on the preserved western wall, insignificant fragments of wall paintings, sometimes barely visible, were preserved, including the image of the All-Seeing Eye and the figures of saints ^[2] .

In 1937, the Krokhinsky church was closed, after which a club, an agricultural workshop with a dryer of hay, and a warehouse of the collective farm “Builder of Communism” were located in its building.

During the design of the Volga-Baltic waterway, Krokhino was among the settlements intended for flooding. In 1953, due to the impending flooding, a flashing beacon for navigation was installed over the dome of the Church of the Nativity of Christ, so the temple avoided demolition. In 1961, the area around the church was flooded with the waters of Sheksna, only a small piece of land remained not flooded at the bell tower. By this time, the apse, the head of the temple and the bell tower, ceilings were destroyed, the interior was lost ^[3] .

In 1973, shots with the Krokhin church were included in the film by Vasily Shukshin “ Kalina red ” ^[4] .

For decades, the walls of the church gradually collapsed under the influence of waves from river ships passing along Sheksna and ice. By the 1980s, the roof of the belfry and the refectory collapsed, the walls of the quadrangle began to crumble, by 2000 a part of the western wall of the refectory collapsed, only the western wall, adjacent to the refectory, and a separate southeast corner remained from the eastern part of the church ^[5] . In the summer of 2010, the southeast corner finally collapsed, the bell tower sank and began to collapse. At the end of 2013 , during a storm on White Lake , the remaining parts of the dome collapsed ^[6] .

The project to preserve and preserve the Church of the Nativity of Christ in Krokhin was launched in March 2009 ^[7] on the initiative of economist Anor Tukaeva, who decided to save this unique temple of the 18th century, which she first saw during an expedition to the flooded places of the Vologda region.

Thanks to the website created on the Internet, the project began to attract public attention. Letters to save the church were sent by Tukaeva to UNESCO and the Presidential Administration of Russia ^[8] . Work has begun on the creation of the Krokhino charity foundation , which was established in December 2010 in Moscow (the only founder and director is Anor Tukaeva).

The project was discussed and supported by specialists from the institutes of art history , archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the cultural and natural heritage named after D. S. Likhachev ^[4] .

The initiative in preserving the church was approved by the Moscow Patriarchate ^[9] .

For several years, the project collected historical and archival data about the temple, received expert opinions on its historical, architectural and cultural value, examined its technical condition and organized dozens of volunteer expeditions to conduct emergency operations on a small island formed around the flooded church from wall fragments falling into the water (including the construction of a man-made dam that protects the building from the effects of waves and ice) ^{[10] [11] [12] [13] [4]} .

Further, the project provides for the arrangement of a memorial track chapel in the lower tier of the bell tower of the church and stylization of the lighthouse in the upper tier ^[14] .

Television journalist Leonid Parfyonov , who visited Krokhin during the filming of his documentary “ Color of the Nation, ” supported the idea of ​​preserving the lighthouse church, emphasizing its historical uniqueness ^[15] . Journalists Andrei Leontyev and Svetlana Sorokina , poetess Yunna Moritz , writer Roman Senchin , publicist Alexander Arkhangelsky , singers Yan Osin , Igor Rasteryaev and Olga Kormukhina also supported the project.

In support of the project, the Krokhino Foundation organized charity concerts, lectures, and the photo exhibition Cities Under Water ^{[16] [17] [18] [19]} .

The story of the flooded church in Krokhin and the volunteer project for its conservation inspired Olga Sivachenko, director of the Saratov children’s theater, “No matter what”, to create the play “Ringer or History Not to Evaluate”, which premiered in April 2013 in Moscow ^{[20] [21 ] [21 ] ]} .

In August 2018, the Vologda Oblast administration officially transferred the building of the Church of the Nativity of Christ to the Krokhino Foundation. This is the first case in Russia of the transfer of an ownerless memorial object to a non-profit organization ^[14] .

In December 2018, the project to preserve the church in Krokhin received a special jury prize of the Russian Geographical Society Prize, presented at the State Kremlin Palace by director Nikita Mikhalkov . The ceremony was attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin ^[22] .