Stroganov Church (Rozhdestvenskaya Church) — one of the oldest active Orthodox churches in Nizhny Novgorod, located on Rozhdestvenskaya Street, near the Nizhne-Volzhskaya Embankment and the River Station.
It is the first major city landmark accessible to tourists arriving by way of the Volga River.
History
The Rozhdestvenskaya Church was founded by salt merchant G. D. Stroganov in 1697 and largely completed by 1703. However, finishing work came to a prolonged halt, and the church was consecrated only in 1719. Researchers believe this was due to the fact that in 1703, following the introduction of the state monopoly on salt trade, G. Stroganov lost his commercial interest in Nizhny Novgorod, grew indifferent to his residence there, and left the city for several years.
The church was originally consecrated in the name of the Assembly of the Mother of God. After the demolition in the early 19th century of the neighboring Church of the Nativity of the Mother of God, built in 1653, its name passed to the Stroganov Church. The Nativity Church looks like a precious carved jewelry box. An extraordinarily lavish white-stone carving — grapevines, flowers, apples, pears, pomegranates, shells, and scrolls — covers its walls in a continuous carpet. In 1860 the bell tower began to lean. Over twenty years it tilted 1.2 meters from the vertical axis. In 1887 its foundations had to be replaced and the upper tiers rebuilt.
Astronomical Clock
The famous episode in the life of inventor Ivan Kulibin is connected with the original "astronomical" clock on the bell tower of the Stroganov Church. As a fifteen-year-old boy, he astonished his fellow townspeople by repairing the broken clock. Unfortunately, this ancient mechanism was lost as early as the beginning of the 19th century. Later, an ordinary striking clock was installed in the belfry, but by the early 20th century it too was out of service.
The mechanism currently in place was manufactured in Germany by the factory of Johann Friedrich Weule in 1879. Originally these clocks were located in Nizhny Novgorod on the building of the Blinovsky Passage, a few hundred meters from the Rozhdestvenskaya Church. After 1917 they were dismantled and kept until recently in the Nizhny Novgorod History Museum.
In the mid-1990s a group of enthusiasts installed these clocks on the bell tower of the Rozhdestvenskaya Church (on most photographs one can notice the black hands on one of the clock faces). However, the installation was carried out extremely poorly, and by the time the church's restoration began the clocks were virtually non-functional.
In 2004–2005 the mechanism was restored by Kaluga craftsman Alexander Georgievich Krasnikov. Almost all the parts of the original antique mechanism were preserved; only new clock faces had to be made.
The clocks now reliably show the time on all four faces and strike an 80-kilogram bell located just beneath the top of the bell tower the corresponding number of times every hour. At half past each hour, a single stroke sounds. This is precisely why these clocks cannot be called "kuranty" — they do not play a melody on the bells.
It should be noted that no electric drive is involved in the operation of the clocks, and twice a week they are wound by a human hand rather than by the soulless force of electricity.