W hile not as elaborate or colorful as the legendary Saint Basil's Cathedral near the Kremlin, the Church of the Nativity is a perfect example of Russian religious architecture. Its most striking attribute is its royal blue onion domes marked with gold stars. Each dome is also crowned with a golden Orthodox cross. It features a tent-style roof. In older churches, these served practical purposes and later, symbolic ones as the church remembered its roots. Also worth noting are the kokoshniki gables (shaped like a cross-section of an onion), which contrast to the standard round zakomary gables employed by some Russian churches. Still, it's a simple looking church with a complex past. Its first caretakers were the nuns of the Nativity Convent, founded in the 1300's. After the Russian Revolution, it fell into the hands of the government, and a state of disrepair. In the mid-1970's it was given to the Moscow Institute of Architecture to be renovated and turned into an art museum. That never happened. The project languished for decades and the church restoration became a joke as scaffolding went up, but the work was abandoned. Eventually, the church became an illicit refuge for the homeless. Then, after the fall of communism, the building was given back to the Russian Orthodox Church which brought it back to its original splendor, and allowed its original caretakers, the nuns of the Nativity Convent, to move back in. After decades of official repression, Russians are once again free to worship as they choose, and they have been restoring the old churches at a fevered pace, preserving a heritage that was quickly vanishing.
