Building the Churches of Kievan Russia by Pavel A. Rappoport

Author:Pavel A. Rappoport [Rappoport, Pavel A.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-12-05T05:00:00+00:00

10

Staircases

The earliest Kievan monument, the Church of the Tithe, must have had a staircase to reach the galleries. Unfortunately, excavations have revealed no traces of it. St Sophia, Kiev, had two stair towers, included in the external western ambulatory and St Sophia, Novgorod, had one. St Sophia, Polotsk, had no galleries, so a rectangular tower adjoined the western part of the northern façade of the cathedral. The towers in two Novgorod churches, the Church of the Annunciation at Gorodishche and the katholikon at the Iur’ev Monastery, were positioned similarly. In the Cathedral of the Transfiguration of the Saviour, Chernigov, the tower also adjoined the western part of the north wall, but was circular, as was the stair tower in the katholikon of the Monastery of St Antony in Novgorod. In the katholikon of the Vydubits Monastery and in the Church of the Transfiguration of the Saviour at Berestovo the tower was largely inside the church, in the northern part of the narthex and only partially projected from the building. Finally, there are examples where the tower was built entirely within the northwestern part of the building and did not project outside at all. Such are the towers in the Golden-Domed Katholikon of the Monastery of the Archangel Michael, Kiev, in the Church of Sts Boris and Gleb at Vyshgorod, in the Church of St Irene, Kiev, and in the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael in Pereiaslavl’. Thus all the monuments which had a staircase in a special tower date to the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Staircases were not placed in other positions at that time.

In Kiev the latest example of a church with a stair tower is the Church of the Transfiguration of the Saviour at Berestovo, built between 1113 and 1125. In Novgorod, judging from indirect evidence, the Church of St John at Opoki, erected between 1127 and 1130, supposedly, had a tower built in one of the western corners.1 Later on, in the twelfth century, stair towers were rarely built and only a few examples are known. In the second half of the twelfth century, for example, a stair tower was built in the southwestern part of the Cathedral of St Nicholas at Iaroslav’s Court in Novgorod, but this exceptional case is to be explained by special circumstances, i.e. the elimination of the passage to the galleries, leading directly from the first floor of the prince’s palace. There are also two monuments from the late twelfth century with stair towers, namely the Church of St Basil at Ovruch, where the western façade was flanked with two round stair towers, and an uncompleted church in Volkovysk, with a square tower near the southwestern corner.

The stairs in the towers were built in a spiral around a central round post. Even when excavations revealed no sign of any such post, that the space was designed for stairs could still be determined from the fact that the foundations normally covered the whole site under the stair tower and not only under the walls.

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