The Naval cathedral of Saint Nicholas in Kronstadt (, Morskoj Nikol'skij sobor) is a Russian Orthodox cathedral built in 1903–1913 as the main church of the Russian Navy and dedicated to all fallen seamen. The cathedral was closed in 1929, was converted to a cinema, a House of Officers (1939) and a museum of the Navy (1980).
The Russian Orthodox Church reinstalled the cross on the main dome in 2002 and (for the first time since 1929) served the Divine Liturgy in the cathedral in 2005. In 2013, the Patriarch of Russia, with Prime Minister Dmitriy Medvedev and his spouse attending, conducted the ceremony of grand reconsecration in the now fully restored cathedral.
Background
The first Orthodox church in Kronstadt was built in 1728–31. The wooden church remained the main place of worship in Russia's largest naval base until 1840, when the counterweights balancing the church bells broke through the rotting floors and seriously damaged the belltower structure. Emperor Nicholas I personally ordered the closure of the unsafe church and it was demolished in 1841. For the next half century worship occurred in temporary locations — in hospitals, barracks and even rented private houses; a temporary wooden church built in 1861 was inadequate for the ten thousand Kronstadt seamen from the start. Numerous Navy requests for construction funding were turned down or simply left unanswered, despite the fact that the cost of a building as large as a contemporary cathedral (200 to 500 thousand roubles) was less than 10% of a pre-dreadnought battleship’s cost (RUB4 to 6 million).
Construction management, extremely centralized until the reign of Alexander II, was gradually decentralized in the 1880s–1890s. The right to initiate individual construction projects passed from the Emperor himself to imperial ministers and department chiefs. In 1896 admiral Pavel Tyrtov, director of the Imperial Russian Navy Ministry, started preparations to build a cathedral in Kronstadt in earnest. Tyrtov insisted that the cathedral be built on the site identified nearly two centuries earlier by Peter I and reasoned that it should not cost more than the new Kharkov cathedral (200,000 roubles).
The contests
In 1897, the Navy declared an international architectural contest for the design of Kronstadt cathedral and established a fund to finance construction. Typically for Russia, the project was sponsored by the state, intended for the state Navy, but initially financed by personal donations of the Navy servicemen and general public. From 1898 to 1913, all servicemen of the Baltic Fleet were charged 1/400 of their salary to finance the construction; this amounted to 280 thousand roubles, not including truly voluntary donations. Later, as the project unfolded, it became obvious that private donations were insufficient and the state treasury paid for most of the costs.
The contest specified cathedral size in terms of number of worshippers — one thousand men, 16 per square sazhen. This was far smaller than contemporary cathedrals built in provincial towns (Nizhny Novgorod — 2,000 worshippers, Kharkiv — 4,000), more on par with "garrison churches" built in the Caucasus and Congress Poland (Kielce — 900 worshippers). The client was well aware of new construction technologies and welcomed their use as long as it helped to balance the budget. The basement level was reserved only for boilers and fuel storage, saving the costs of establishing a second "winter (i.e. heated) church". The specifications did not prescribe a specific architectural style. Rather, they insisted on cutting costs and prohibited use of such "luxuries" as mosaics or paintings on the inner surface of the dome. These constraints failed the first contest. Only three architects dared to participate, reusing already familiar past drafts; all three were rejected.
The second contest of 1897 also failed; the only draft deemed worthy of execution was too small for the intended purpose. Finally, in 1898, the Navy lifted some of size and cost constraints; this time, the building had to be large enough to be visible from large distance; "the Cross of the cathedral must be the first item visible to incoming ships". Antony Tomishko, author of Kresty prison, won this contest by presenting a Russian Revival draft following Konstantin Thon's Russo-Byzantine tradition.