AT A GLANCE
Why go?
The Church of Saint Alexander Nevsky is a mid-18th-century five-domed brick church standing on Sovetskaya Street in Pereslavl-Zalessky, the birthplace of the great prince to whom it is dedicated. One of two twin temples near the town's historic Red Square, it survived Soviet-era conversion into a library, bread shop, and garage before being returned to the faithful in the 1990s.↗↗
A Temple Born of Textile Wealth
The church was built in the 1740s through the patronage of Fyodor Ugryumov, a local linen-factory owner, who financed both it and its near-identical companion, the Vladimir Cathedral, as part of the Bogoroditsko-Sretensky Convent — a small women's monastery situated beside Pereslavl's ancient earthworks. When the impoverished convent was suppressed soon after construction, the two temples became parish churches. The bell tower that once stood between them, a tall round belfry, was demolished in the 1930s during road-widening of the old Yaroslavl highway.↗↗↗