Holy Resurrection Cathedral: built from an unfinished Soviet office block, it became one of the only churches in Bishkek to survive Khrushchev’s purge – Virtual Tour 360°

In Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, then Frunze in the USSR, the question of building an Orthodox church in the capital was raised in 1943. In 1944 the local Orthodox community was assigned an unfinished building, according to the Russian sources consulted the so-called «Kirpromsovet», an administrative building tied to the brick industry, to be turned into a place of worship. The cathedral therefore did not begin as a church, but as the conversion of a Soviet civic structure left half-built. The conversion work, led by the master builder V. V. Veryuzhsky, ran from 1944 to 1947, with the services held in the open air at first. The consecration took place on 1 January 1947 at the hands of Bishop Guriy (Egorov) of Tashkent and Central Asia, after a preliminary blessing attributed in 1944 to Bishop Cyril (Pospelov). Unlike other Orthodox churches of Central Asia of the same period, often built of wood to withstand earthquakes, this cathedral is not a timber building: its walls are clad in ceramic tiles, with a fluted barrel-vault roof and six small blue onion domes on narrow drums, and a tent bell tower 29.5 metres tall. Inside, a single large hall of about 10 by 30 metres holds a three-tiered iconostasis and two altars, dedicated to the Resurrection of Christ and to Saint Alexius. The parish came through the anti-religious campaign of the Khrushchev era, at the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties, without being closed, unlike other churches of the city: the Cathedral of Saint Nicholas was turned into an art museum, and the Church of Saint Seraphim became an orphanage and was later pulled down. It did suffer restrictions, such as the moving of the main entrance to a side street to reduce its visibility from the main avenue. Despite the repressive climate, in 1953 the artist B. N. Chistyakov painted a fresco of the Resurrection on the eastern front, and between 1956 and 1957 a baptistery with a dome of its own was added. In 1996, for the 125th anniversary of the Orthodox diocese of Central Asia and a visit by Patriarch Alexy II, President Askar Akaev signed a decree to enlarge and lay out the grounds of the cathedral, pulling down nearby buildings to open the view from the street. On 27 July 2011 the diocese of Bishkek was set up and the church became its cathedral; on 28 May 2017 Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia celebrated the rite of the great consecration there in person. Today the cathedral is not on any UNESCO list, nor is a legal status as a protected monument in Kyrgyzstan confirmed, although it is currently described as a historic landmark of the city.