Kalyazin Architect Averky Mokeyev and the Ancient Russian Architecture of the Mid-17th and Late 17th Century

Among the few documented Russian master builders active in Rus’ in the 17th century, the Kalyazin architect Averky Mokeev deserves special attention. Despite his close ties to the Tver region and, above all, the Trinity Kalyazin Monastery, where Mokeev began working in the 1630s and 1640s, he, like many “masters” and “apprentices” of the time, could not avoid collaborating with the Moscow Stone Department. This was due to the interest in the Kalyazin architect’s creative endeavors by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich’s wife, Maria Ilyinichna, and Patriarch Nikon, who in the mid-1650s sought refuge in the Kalyazin Monastery from the “plague raging in Moscow”. Ultimately, on Nikon’s initiative, Mokeev constructed the main structures at the Iversky Monastery in Novgorod: a cathedral and a refectory with a heated chapel. These works likely made Mokeev, as well as the construction team associated with the Kalyazin Monastery, extremely sought after in the Tver lands, and especially in the capital of the Upper Volga region. In the 1660s and 1670s, these architects radically renovated the bishop’s residence in the Tver Kremlin. Among the structures erected there was a new palace for the bishop and a number of other buildings, notable among them the pillar-shaped Church of the Procession of the Holy Cross, which was likely the earliest church in Rus’ with a petal-shaped lower tier. I believe that during this same period, drawing on the experience Mokeev gained in the 1640s building the stone walls and towers of the Kalyazin Monastery, the architect also distinguished himself in the creation of the only stone tower of the Tver Kremlin. Averky Mokeev most likely passed away in the 1680s, as he no longer participated in the construction of the first stone church in the future city of Kalyazin in the early 1690s.