Nice, January 19, 2016
© RIA-Novosti/Daniel Nizamutdinov.
One of the most beautiful Russian Orthodox churches outside Russia, the St. Nicholas Cathedral in Nice is opening on Tuesday after restoration which lasted more than eighteen months, reports a spokesman of RIA-Novosti.
On Tuesday morning the clergy celebrated the lesser consecration of the church, served the Divine Liturgy and performed the Great Blessing of Waters. An official ceremony with participation by officials of the Executive Office of the Russian Federation’s President, local authorities and Russian diplomats was scheduled for 14.00 Moscow time on Tuesday.
The St. Nicholas Cathedral is one of the main sights of Nice and one of the most popular historic monuments of Cote d’Azur (a coastal area of south-eastern France). Thus, according to the Nice-Matin French local daily newspaper, 273,000 people visited it in 2010.
The history of the Russian St. Nicholas cathedral of Nice began early in the 20th century, when around 150 wealthy and powerful Russian families lived in the city. The community became so large that the small church in Rue Longchamp could no longer accommodate all the parishioners, so it was decided to build a new one. The funds used for building the new church went from the treasury of the Holy Emperor Nicholas II, from the local community, and the Russian nobility. The construction of the cathedral near Boulevard du Tzarewitch began in 1903 and was finished nine years later, in 1912.
Built according to a design by architect Mikhail Preobrazhensky in the style typical for 16th century churches of Moscow and Yaroslavl, the cathedral has five domes.
The distinctive feature of the cathedral is its decoration for which local materials were partially used: thanks to the combination of light brown bricks, milk-white capstone and blue-green ornamented tiles the cathedral, not losing its originality, blends well with the characteristic Mediterranean landscapes.
The restoration work has been carried out not only in the cathedral, but also in the St. Nicholas Chapel built in 1869 on the site of the Villa Bermont where Cesarevitch Nicholas Alexandrovich, son of Emperor Alexander II, had died in 1865 of tuberculous meningitis.
From 1923 the cathedral was managed by the Orthodox Association of Nice (ACOR) which has been under the Patriarchate of Constantinople since 1931. In 2013, after a long procedure, the court of cassation of France upheld the Russian Federation’s ownership of the cathedral. At that time it was it was it a nearly dangerous condition. By order of President Vladimir Putin, budgetary funds were earmarked for the reconstruction and restoration of this architectural monument.