page_title: Annunciation Church of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra
section_title: Soviet period
hierarchical_section_title: Annunciation Church of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra / Soviet period
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Благовещенская церковь Александро-Невской лавры
context_page_description: The Annunciation Church of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, or in full, the Church of the Blessing of the Most Holy Virgin and the Holy Blessed Prince Alexander Nevsky is a Russian Orthodox church in Saint Petersburg. It is in the Diocese of Saint Petersburg and is part of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.
  The church was one of the earliest buildings in the monastery complex, begun in 1719 and completed by 1725. The building contained two churches, the upper floor was dedicated to Saint Alexander Nevsky and was built to hold his relics, installed when the church was consecrated in 1724. The church on the ground floor, originally planned to be the monastery refectory, was dedicated to the annunciation of the Virgin Mary and was consecrated in 1725. Both were richly decorated by prominent Russian artisans and received important donations of decorations and fixtures from the imperial family. From its early years it became an important burial ground for members of the imperial family, their associates, and the Russian nobility. The wealthy paid for elaborate monuments, and the several noble families established burial vaults in the church.
context_section_description: The church was closed on 15 February 1933. The lower Annunciation Church was handed over to the forerunner of the State Museum of Urban Sculpture, which had taken over the Lavra's Lazarevskoe and Tikhvin Cemeteries to run as museum necropolises. The upper church was divided up into smaller rooms to provide office space. It was used for a time by the geodesic survey department of Giprogor Institute. Little was done to protect the funerary monuments, despite a letter from Maxim Gorky to Andrei Zhdanov urging action. The church was used as a warehouse, and furnaces were installed. During this period some of the funerary monuments from the Lavra's Nikolo-Fyodorovskaya and Isidorovskaya churches, which had been closed in 1931, were moved to the lower Annunciation Church. In 1940 the entire building was transferred to the State Museum of Urban Sculpture.  The memorials of Napoleonic military leaders Mikhail Miloradovich and Dmitry Senyavin were placed in the church after the closure of the Dukhovskaya Church, while those of Ivan Lazarev and Gerasim Lebedev were brought from other locations as part of a general clearing of cemeteries and the concentration of funerary monuments into centralised museum necropolises. In other instances parts of memorials, such as plaques and reliefs from the monuments of Alexei Turchaninov and Anna Vorontsova in the Lavra's Lazarevskoe Cemetery were installed in the church.   In the case of sculptor Mikhail Kozlovsky, his monument was transferred from the Smolensky Cemetery to the Lazarevskoe in 1931, with some of the reliefs installed in the Annunciation Church.
  Some repair work was carried out during the Second World War, when a military hospital opened in the grounds of the monastery during the siege of Leningrad. Suvorov's grave became a source of patriotic inspiration, and in November 1942 the grave was repaired and decorated with panels and flags. Soldiers defending Leningrad would also visit to pay their respects. After repairs, the building opened on 15 May 1950 as a museum display of historic funerary monuments under the auspices of the State Museum of Urban Sculpture. Between 1988 and 1999 a complex restoration of the Annunciation Church took place. After the fall of the Soviet Union the church building remained in the ownership of the State Museum of Urban Sculpture, despite requests by the Orthodox Church for its return. On 7 April 2013, the 300th anniversary of the monastery, vice-governor of Saint Petersburg Vasily Kichedzhi announced that the Annunciation Church would be returned to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.  The return of the church to the monastery authorities has however been complicated by questions around the ownership of the memorials.
caption: The upper church. Examples of different funerary monuments.
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