The church in Sloboda

So much of art historic study focuses on churches.  I think a church, more than an abstract painting, a triumphant sculpture, a palace, or even a religious image, requires one to understand its purpose and meaning in order to understand the full significance of specific architectural styles and elements used for its construction.  So to get an insider view on a general feel and meaning of church, I think about the only church that has always been present in my life.

It is not any longer in use.  In fact it hasn’t been in use for a very long time.  You could say that it is hardly there at all, and hardly a church at all.  It stands in a now abandoned village, and I visit it when I go there once a year.  One of the domes has fallen off, the floor boards are dissembled, the wall frescoes are almost gone, windows broken, and only the long hook stretching all the way from the dome remains where a chandelier used to hang.

The wooden staircase from the second floor to the roof still remains, and we used to climb up there, using first the bricks sticking out of the wall, then the metal bars of the window, and then the staircase.  All accessible and seemingly inaccessible parts of the walls are covered in written and carved out names and inscriptions, and everything useful has long been taken out.

But when you look at the rounded wall of where the altar must have been, the tripartite entrance to the altar, and the remaining frescoes beneath the dome, it is very simply and clearly – a church.  And then I start thinking that it has a basilica ground plan, that must have come from the western cathedrals, a bell tower attached to the main body of the church, a feature that started in Pskov, but I have to stop… 

Because I can’t think of this church as an exemplar within a large history of building churches.  This church is just a church.  This church is a set of my memories, my feelings, and my experiences.  The importance is not how the architecture of this church relates to other churches, but how it relates to me, and how I relate to it.  And I think that this is exactly what one has to understand about churches.  That it forms a privacy, a space for a person to be with himself.  And the only way to understand the physical elements of a particular church, is to search for the spiritual meaning that they convey to you alone.