🏛 Church of St Clement

Климентовский пер., 7

A huge red-and-white five-domed 18th-century church, a rare example of Elizabethan Baroque in Moscow.

The present five-domed church was built in 1762–1769; the architect is unknown, supposedly Pietro Antonio Trezzini.
Tradition says that 70,000 rubles for the construction were given by Chancellor Alexey Bestuzhev-Ryumin, whose estate was nearby; the church was completed by the merchant Kuzma Matveev.
The main altar is consecrated to the Transfiguration, so the church is also called Spaso-Preobrazhensky.
In the 1930s the church was closed and given over to a book depository of the Lenin Library, which is why the iconostasis and interior survived.
The building was returned to believers in 2008, and after restoration in 2014 it was consecrated by Patriarch Kirill.
Apollon Grigoryev in his memoirs singled it out among the Zamoskvorechye churches as "five-domed, magnificent".