“No place in the centre”: Theologian outraged by UOC temple's architecture

Project of the Trinity Cathedral in Kiev. Photo: troitskiy.church.ua

The theologian of the OCU Yuri Chernomorets criticized the construction of the Holy Trinity Cathedral of the UOC in Kyiv because of architecture that reminds him of "Mother Russia". Yuri Chernomorets wrote about this on his Facebook page.

According to him, “now that the project of the renewed temple along with the spiritual educational center is finally outlined upon Novinsky’s initiative, I have only one question: who coordinated this purely Russian church with a ‘tower’?”

Chernomorets is perplexed: “How does this fit into the surrounding context at least somehow? How can this even be practically in the center of Ukraine? I am merely surprised and shocked so far, to be honest.”

“We’ll also see how everything will be done, what colors it'll be painted and so on, but so far, when everything has been built though not yet painted, it looks exactly like Mother Russia by sight ...” said Chernomorets.

At the same time, Yuri Chernomorets wrote that “my father, Nikolai Radetsky, was the last rector of the Trinity temple before its destruction over one night by order of Khrushchov.”

At the same time, the church in honor of the Holy Trinity is being renewed precisely in accordance with its pre-revolutionary architecture: “In the center of Kyiv, a cathedral is being built in honor of the Holy Trinity. This temple is being erected in Bolshaya Vasilkovskaya Street on the site of the destroyed temple, whose construction began in the early twentieth century. They could not finish it due to military and revolutionary events, and it was destroyed even before the war. The temple is built according to the same design project, given our current realities,” specified Archpriest Konstantin Kurbanov, rector of the church.

Earlier, the UOJ wrote that in the center of Kyiv, near the NSC Olimpiysky, a large-scale dome was installed on the Cathedral, which had been built for many years on the site of the one destroyed after the 1917 revolution.

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