The Church of the Ascension

Kolomenskoye Estate

A short ride from the city center will take you to Kolomenskoe Museum-Reserve, where you can get an idea of what Medieval Moscow looked like. Here you’ll find the oldest garden in Moscow and a favorite estate of Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich, father of Peter the Great.

The Church of the Ascension was built in 1532 on the imperial estate of Kolomenskoye to celebrate the birth of the prince who was to become Tsar Ivan IV ('the Terrible'). One of the earliest examples of a traditional wooden tent-roofed church on a stone and brick substructure, it had a great influence on the development of Russian ecclesiastical architecture and is now one of Russia's few UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE SITES.