“New Jerusalem” in Seventeenth-Century Russia

Abstract

‪Patriarch Nikon’s creation of the Resurrection “New Jerusalem” Monastery in cooperation with Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich reflects Russia‪‪’‪‪s self‑image as a new Holy Land and its relations with the Orthodox East in the seventeenth century. This essay identifies the “Byzantine” paradigms guiding the patriarch’s visualization of Salvation history at Voskresenskii Monastery and demonstrates the extent to which the construction of and responses to the monastery were shaped by Greek hierarchs in Moscow. Nikon conceptualized the monastery as “image” or “icon” of the Holy Land on the authority of the Decree of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, Synodicon, Skrizhal´, and certain “historical” texts. The realization of the patriarch’s New Jerusalem involved both the replication of prototypes in Palestine and the Romanovs’ reenactment of the original construction of the Holy Land by Emperor Constantine and his mother Helen in the fourth century. Notions of the Russian New Jerusalem and the Romanovs’ claims to the Byzantine legacy were interdependent and mutually reinforcing. While embraced by dissenting Old Believers, the New Jerusalem‑related charges initiated in the 1660s by the Eastern hierarchs in order to disgrace and condemn the patriarch and his foundation were soon rejected by the Russian hierarchy and the Romanovs who resurrected the “New Jerusalem” idea and favored its namesake monastery for centuries. ‪