Duke's Excellent Adventure!: Church of the Resurrection on Spilled Blood

Sunday, August 26, 2012
St. Petersburg, Russian Federation

Today during my tour of cathedrals and churches in St. Petersburg, I visited the Church of the Resurrection on Spilled Blood. There are so many things I found interested about this place, that I wanted to give it it's own entry.

First of all, let me share the outside with you. These three pictures are actually from my canal tour that I took a month earlier, but I'm going to post them again because I didn't take any outside pictures on this day.

Tetris Anyone?

The "onion domes" that are so prevalent in Russian architecture are only found on Orthodox Churches. They are symbolic of the flame of the Holy Spirit (picture the tongues of fire on Pentacost). You will often see five onion domes on a church. There are usually four on the outside to represent the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, (or for you Bible scholars perhaps Lion, Ox, Man, and Eagle), and the center one is always the flame of Jesus the Christ.

Let's go inside.

All of the art is done in mosaics.

Close up of the mosaic work.

Here is the Icon Wall. I think that they believe the space behind it to be holy space. It's viewed as a portal to heaven. What this means is that you can never rent out an orthodox church for a concert performance. That idea doesn't even register in their heads because it's a holy place, set apart, for no use but God's.

Icon Wall.

So why is it called Church of the Resurrection on Spilled Blood? The name is officially The Church of the Resurrection, but the rest of the name comes from the whole reason why this church was built in the first place.

There was a Czar, and this Czar was beloved by many. Unfortunately, this Czar was the target of an assassination attempt when man tried to blow up his carriage. Bombs being what they were in those days, it was an unsuccessful attempt, however the carriage driver was severely wounded. So, the Czar goes over to help his driver. At this point, the assassin come out of hiding, runs up to the Czar, and shoots him at point blank range.

The new Czar, son of the man who was killed, erected this church in honor of his father. It was built on the very spot his father was killed.

The altar in this picture marks the exact location of the assassination.

Hence, Church on Spilled Blood.

I'm going to explain the Orthodox Cross now. You take a regular cross, and you add two lines. You add a small one at the top, and you add a small slanted one at the bottom. If you go back a few entries, and look at my post with the bike tour of Tallinn, Estonia, you will see that the statue of Rusalka has an orthodox cross on it.

The following picture explains the significance of the design of the orthodox cross.

But wait, there's more! I saved this last bit for the most super type of Biblical Scholar and nerd.

Have you ever read the passages in the Bible that give you descriptions of the Cherubim. Go pick up Ezekiel, and start reading. It won't be long until you're hit by a description that makes you say, WTF?

Well, here inside the Church on Spilled Blood, I saw something that I had never seen before: the walls were plastered with Cherubim! I took many pictures of these guardian type angels, and I've picked three to share with you.

Here are a few characteristics that make them a crazy thing to conceptualize and then draw: Six wings, Wheels of Eyes, and sometimes covering hands, face, and feet.