Photo: architectural monuments, other places, Pobedy Square, Kaluga

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Pobedy Square, Cosmas and Damian Church and Thoughts of the Eternal

Architectural Monuments • Other places

The Pobedy Square (Victory Square) in Kaluga was called Drovyanaya in the 19th century and was considered one of the main in the city. Wood and coal were on sale here. Unofficially it was also called the Konnaya, as it was permanently crowded with carts, as well as Tereninskaya - by the name of the landowners who had a large stone house on the square. This mansion is famous for the fact that Fekla, the daughter of the last Georgian King Irakli, lived here in the 1930s. Today the Pobedy Square is a large memorial complex. Next to it there rise the towers of the Cosmas and Damian Church, which differs vastly from the memorial ensemble by its baroque appearance.

The present Pobedy Square has long served as a place for entertainment: here there was a skating rink in winter and a menagerie in summer. This went on until the 1960s when it was already called the Square of Socialism. It was decided to rename and overbuild the square for the 20th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War: here appeared the Eternal Flame, a fountain, the Victory Monument crowned with a woman’s figure, and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. At a time of the modern history of Russia there were installed a Veteran Monument, a Monument to Soldiers-Internationalists and a Monument to the Marshal and Hero of the Great Patriotic War Georgy Zhukov.The five-domed Cosmas and Damian Church with a bell tower near Pobedy Square is one of the most elegant buildings in the city. A white stone temple with black domes and red roofs is often compared to a ship, and its bell tower - with a mast. The church, dedicated to Cosmas and Damian, the patron saints of family tie, experienced hard times in the twentieth century. Soviet power used the temple as an isolator for criminals and as a supply room. A number of urban legends are associated with the activity of the Bolsheviks in this church. For example, the Komsomol members, sent to destroy the frescoes of the temple, did not cope with the task: the holy faces came through the paint twice. When one of the activists tried to destroy them with a hammer, he immediately fell breathless. Restoration of the church, returned to the believers in the 1990s, is still underway; one of the chapels is already open and conducts services. The wall mosaics on the church facade and a few especially revered icons, including the image of Cosmas and Damian, managed to be preserved. Kaluga residents prayed to this image before giving their children to study.

Pobedy Square, Cosmas and Damian Church and Thoughts of the Eternal

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