The Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra

In the reign of the tsar Ivan IV, who had a particular veneration for St. Sergius, the monastery was surrounded by a stone enclosure topped by 12 towers. After the end of the wars against Tartars and the victory over the kingdoms of Kazan and Astrakhan , the tsar began building a large and beautiful church, dedcated to the Dormition of the Mother of God, a copy of the Kremlin Dormition Cathedral. The walls, the pillars and the vaults are covered with frescoes on the subjects of Church History. Most of the wall frescoes are dedicated to the Dormition of the Holy Virgin. On the pillars there are images of the most highly venerated saints of the Orthodox Church. The magnificent frescoes of the Cathedral were created in 1684 by 35 painters in a 100 days. The frescoes cover the area of 500 square metres. The 5-tier iconostasis consists of 76 icons dated back to the 16th–17th centuries. The celebrated seventeenth-century painter Simon Ushakov, the royal isographer, took part in the creation of the iconostasis.

In the Dormition Cathedral there are two shrines with the holy relics of St. Filaret (Drozdov † 1867) and St. Innokenty (Veniaminov † 1879), Metropolitans of Moscow. By the western wall, to the right of the entrance, you can see the tomb of Makarius (Bulgakov † 1882), one of Moscow Metropolitans, who created many outstanding works on the history of the Russian Orthodox Church and on dogmatic theology.