Nativity Cathedral: Khrushchev’s regime tore down its bell tower in 1962, and independence rebuilt it decades later

In Chișinău, the capital of Moldova, the Nativity Cathedral was built between 1830 and 1836 to a design by the architect Avraam Melnikov, chosen by competition, in a late Neoclassical style with a Russian imperial stamp, on a symmetrical cruciform plan over a 27-metre square base, with four identical facades, each with a portico of six Doric columns. The site had already been reserved in the city’s 1817 urban plan. The bell tower, built in the same period about forty metres from the cathedral in a similar style, was torn down by the Soviet authorities in December 1962, as part of Nikita Khrushchev’s anti-religious campaign, and was rebuilt only after Moldovan independence, according to the sources between 1997 and 1998, based on period images and plans. During the Soviet period the building was used as an exhibition hall run by the Ministry of Culture of the Moldavian SSR, with public worship banned. Already damaged by an earthquake in 1940 and by Second World War bombing, it was first restored in 1956 under Soviet administration. The return to religious use happened gradually between 1989 and 1991, in the years of Gorbachev-era liberalisation and Moldovan independence, with full restoration and the formal reconsecration of the dome on 25 August 1996. The present zinc dome dates to that restoration, not to the original 1836 building. The cathedral is the seat of the metropolis of Chișinău and all Moldova, an autonomous jurisdiction linked to the Moscow patriarchate, in rivalry with the smaller metropolis of Bessarabia, linked instead to the Romanian patriarchate and restored in 1992 after Soviet suppression. Since 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, almost two hundred Moldovan parishes have, according to press sources, moved from the Moscow metropolis to the Romanian one, in a context of national ecclesiastical tension that does not, however, appear to have directly involved this cathedral, which remained the seat of the Chișinău metropolis throughout. On 8 October 1939 the first broadcast of the Radio Basarabia station, Chișinău’s first radio station, went out live from this cathedral, carrying the liturgy. In 2016 the National Bank of Moldova minted a silver coin of fifty lei for the cathedral’s one hundred and eightieth anniversary. No papal visit is on record, as expected for an Orthodox building, nor is any specific event tied to Moldovan independence in 1991 documented in this cathedral in particular, distinct from a similar ceremony held instead in the Church of the Dormition, on 8 January 1991.