When the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was demolished, the Russian Orthodox Church needed a mother church, and it found one in a parish building in eastern Moscow. Through most of the twentieth century the Epiphany Cathedral at Yelokhovo was the seat of the Patriarch of Moscow, the place where patriarchs were enthroned and buried and where the faith kept a public address in an officially atheist state. The film examines the building itself - a nineteenth-century composition in classical taste, crowned by five domes and lit by a vast interior that opens onto a richly gilded iconostasis - and the devotional life it shelters, including the relics of Metropolitan Alexis of Moscow. It also recalls that an earlier church on this site witnessed the baptism of Alexander Pushkin. A strong stand-alone title for sacred-heritage and religious-history strands.
