ABSTRACT
After the interregnum known as the Time of Troubles, at the beginning of the 17th century, the national recovery seemed to call forth elaborate exterior decoration, exemplified by the Church of the Trinity in Nikitniki, situated on a lane in Moscow’s Kitai-gorod. Endowed by the merchant Grigory Nikitnikov, the church consists of a central cube with five cupolas and no interior piers—an indication both of its modest size and of the flexible possibilities of brick construction. After its completion in 1634, the original pentacupolar structure acquired over the next two decades two chapels (attached at the northeast and southeast) and an enclosed gallery leading to a bell tower with tent roof on the northwest corner. This is the earliest example of the placement of a bell tower within the church ensemble—a practice that would become generally accepted in parish architecture in the seventeenth century. At the corner of the bell tower the gallery turns at a right angle and descends by a covered staircase to a porch at the southwest corner, capped by kokoshniki and yet another pyramidal roof. The south Chapel of Nikita (St. Nicetas) the Warrior served as the family burial chapel.
