SACRED TOPICS OF RUSSIAN CITIES (5). THE CATHEDRAL AND THE GATE
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2018-1-70-92
In this article, I continue the study of sacred topics of Russian cities. Here I define the syntactic meaning of the architectural ensemble “cathedral – gate”. The article shows that the main semiotic function of the cathedral is the visual designation of the city sacred center, which expresses the idea of the beginning and center of the inhabited world. Being structured in a certain way in its internal volume, the cathedral also acts as the dominant architectural element that gives orderliness to the entire urban space. The dynamics of the cathedral interior, spread over the city as a whole, gives the urban topic the property of “transitivity”, movement, spatial unevenness. Such heterogeneity of the urban living environment is optically expressed as a hierarchical “condensation” of sacred space from the periphery to the center (concentricity). The direction of this increase in sacredness is set by two positional dominants – the main entrance to the city and the cathedral. In Kiev of Yaroslav the Wise, these positions are occupied by the Cathedral of St. Sophia and the Golden Gate. This urban planning “scheme”, which is reproduced in all Russian cities and monasteries, corresponds to the spatial structure of the Garden of Eden, the Israeli “marching camp”, historic Jerusalem and the Heavenly City. The Russian city, organized according to the described “type” (Aldo Rossi), is a multi-layered spatial icon, an architectural representation and a concrete embodiment of archetypal sacred space.
Keywords: visual semiotics, Eastern Christianity, city, sacred architecture, visual organization of space, center, concentricity, cathedral, gate
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Issue: 1, 2018
Series of issue: Issue 1
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 70 — 92
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