Cathedral of the Nativity of the Theotokos, Suzdal: rebuilt after a 13th-century collapse and a 15th-century fire, its bronze doors still fire-gilded

At the centre of the Suzdal Kremlin, in Russia, a cathedral already stood around 1096-1102. Most sources say it was raised by Prince Vladimir II Monomakh, although the original dedication of that building remains uncertain, and some sources give it to the Dormition rather than to the Nativity. In 1222 Prince Yuri II of Vladimir ordered the demolition of the by then decayed structure and the building of a new cathedral in white stone, dedicated to the Nativity of the Mother of God, completed in 1225 with blind arches and carved decoration, including masks and lions. The famous «Golden Gates», copper panels gilded by the fire technique and decorated in niello with biblical scenes, belong to this period, datable to between about 1230 and 1240, with the western portal generally held to be earlier than the southern one, although the precise dates of the two portals, sometimes given as 1233 and 1248, are not confirmed by fully independent sources. A fire, attributed to a Tatar raid, destroyed the roof and the upper part of the building in 1445. The rebuilding, carried out between 1528 and 1530 under Grand Prince Basil III, kept the white stone walls of the thirteenth century up to the height of the arcades, completing the upper part in brick and turning the roof from three domes into five: the building seen today is therefore a hybrid of a thirteenth-century base and a sixteenth-century top. Inside, fragments of frescoes survive from the 30s of the thirteenth century, together with later layers of the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the latter commissioned by Bishop Serapion in the 30s of the seventeenth century. The sources do not agree on the dating of the present iconostasis, given by some to a seventeenth-century arrangement and by others to a Soviet restoration of the 60s of the twentieth century. The cathedral is the focus of the Suzdal Kremlin, beside the Archiepiscopal Chambers, enlarged between the 15th and the 18th centuries, and a tent-roofed octagonal bell tower added in 1635. After closure in the Soviet period, the first religious services resumed in 1991, followed in February 1992 by a formal agreement of shared use between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Vladimir-Suzdal state museum reserve. The building is part of the serial UNESCO site «White Monuments of Vladimir and Suzdal», inscribed in 1992, although it was not possible to check directly on the official text of the nomination whether the cathedral appears there named individually or only as part of the complex of the Suzdal Kremlin.