Inside Transfiguration

The Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Transfiguration of Our Lord
by Frances Richard

There is something local but otherworldly about The Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Transfiguration of Our Lord. Coming upon its onion domes and eight-bar crosses among the grimy redbrick warehouses of Northside Williamsburg can feel like passing through a timespace rip into some other city’s Old Quarter. Inset from the street by its four corner cupolas, the central dome slips out of your sightline as you walk toward it, emerging suddenly in improbable grandeur. Or the buoyant, voluptuous edifice may float ahead of you for blocks, like a mirage. Approached from the Greenpoint side, along the sycamore-lined edge of McCarren Park, the Cathedral dominates the view, but subtly, screened by trees as if the baseball fields and family picnic grounds were a countryside across which you were travelling in pilgrimage. When afternoon sun strikes its yellow bricks and green-patinaed copper, Transfiguration seems singled out, oracular, glowing with baroque-angel tones.

Even when the sight has become a neighborhood commonplace, there remains something majestically non-American about the onion domes. In their sinuous amplitude, they present a deep reorganization of the pointy, quasi-Gothic town-square steeple that is our cultural sign for "community church." But then, most American liturgical architecture is not inspired by the Cathedral of the Dormition in Moscow. In fact, the history of Transfiguration is, in microcosm, the history of Slavic Williamsburg. Its members began to arrive in the 1880s, having left their homes in the Galicia region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, north of the Carpathian Mountains in what is today southeastern Poland and southwestern Ukraine. Brooklyn at this point was in transition from the bustling village of Walt Whitman’s time to industrially revolutionized metropolis, and the Slavic newcomers congregated in neighborhoods along the East River where sugar refineries, jute mills, and foundries were proliferating.

Transfiguration parish was founded in 1908, in the same way many subsequent Williamsburg projects have undoubtedly been launched, when two young men ran into each other at the corner of Bedford Avenue and N. 7th Street. According to the Cathedral’s Ninetieth Jubilee Commemoration book, Dyonisi Kuzma got talking with Victor Gladek and asked him if there were many Russians in the neighborhood. Victor answered that there were, although there was no Orthodox church nearby. The enterprising Dyonisi proposed that they establish one. Enlisting the help of Lucas Taras, they held planning meetings in Taras’s apartment at N. 7th and Wythe, and raised an initial stake of $150. The group then approached Archpriest Alexander Hotovitsky, Rector of St. Nicholas Cathedral in Manhattan, to sponsor their new parish with the diocese. Hotovitsky eventually served the first Mass — which was attended by the Tsar’s Imperial Emissary Nikolai Nikolaievich Lodizensky — and remained the community’s spiritual father until 1937, when he was recalled by his bishop to the Soviet Union and disappeared into a Stalinist prison. Hotovitsky was canonized in 1995, and an icon of the newly minted St. Alexander is now prominently displayed in the Cathedral, where parishioners file past to bestow upon it the ritual icon-kiss, and yellow votive candles enshrine the Archpriest’s modern martyrdom.

Victor and Dyonisi named their project for St. Vladimir, the 9th century converter of Russia, and bought a wood-frame Methodist church on N. 5th Street between Bedford and Driggs. (The same block now sites the Holy Ghost Ukrainian Catholic church, more modest than the Cathedral but sharing its distinctive yellow brick and patinaed-copper exterior, with a spire topped by the eight-bar or patriarchal cross.) St. Vladimir’s was re-dedicated and fitted with an elaborate three-tier iconostasis or altar-screen, built in Germany according to plans sent from Russia. Painstakingly disassembled and re-installed when the parish moved in 1916, the iconostasis still forms the centerpiece of the Cathedral’s decor. According to the Ninetieth Jubilee book, its traditional gold-leafed images are copies of beloved Russian icons, painted by "Iconographers Sokoloff and Lopatkin," artisans brought to the United States for the purpose. The most famous of these — a replica of the "Mother of God of Pochaev," a 16th century Madonna from southern Ukraine — is reputed to have inherited the original’s miraculous powers.

Unrest in Tsarist Russia and work opportunities in America conspired to encourage immigration, and the parish quickly outgrew St. Vladimir’s. The present site, comprising five adjacent lots at N. 12th and Driggs, was purchased in 1916 for $16,000, a relative bargain at the equivalent of $252,184 in 2000 dollars; the original quote for design and construction of the Cathedral and its adjacent Rectory by architect Louis Allmendiger was $117,000, translating to a contemporary cost of $1,844,092. The outbreak of World War I caused shortages in labor and materials, and the October Revolution cut off promised support from the government of Tsar Nicholas. Cost overruns eventually reached some $20,000, an additional $315,230 in today’s dollars. But even in the face of these setbacks, it took only six years to finish the project, though for three of those — having sold the N. 5th St. property to raise money — the congregation worshipped in the unfinished building, with a skeleton dome overhead and the altar-goods in storage. In the end, parishioners finished the copper cladding of the five domes and installed the 1,002 lb. bell themselves.

In the late 1940s — with the community still reeling from the Depression and deeply in debt — a group of donors financed the parcel at N. 11th and Driggs that is now the Cathedral’s "meditation garden." With its modest rosebushes and scattered picnic tables, the garden is more shared backyard than cloistered retreat. But any patch of grass takes on a sacred aura in these concrete precincts, and the garden’s lone tree is doubtless a profound improvement over the lumberyard that would have occupied the lot had the church fathers not scraped their funds together. The Cathedral is a designated Landmark of the City Of New York, and in 1980 was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Archpriest Father Wiaczeslaw Krawchuk is Rector of Transfiguration now. Orthodox dogma allows priests to marry, and when I came to call on Father Wiaczeslaw at the Rectory, his daughter Alexandra was rollerblading in the concrete gangway, clad in a Chicago Bulls jersey and kneepads and wielding a hockey stick. Father Wiaczeslaw comes from Warsaw, and in recent years the Polish constituency of his congregation has grown. Mass is celebrated in English, with gospel readings and announcements given bilingually in English and Church Slavonic, a pan-Slavic dialect which, like Latin, is extinct as an everyday language but remains the liturgical medium of Russian Orthodoxy. We sit in the Rector’s office, with piles of papers accumulated on every surface, a gilded icon above the computer, and a hallway hung with children’s drawings visible through a glass-paneled inner door. We talk, inevitably, about changes in the neighborhood — parishioners who once paid $500 per month rent are paying $1400 now, Father Wiaczeslaw says, and many have moved upstate or to Long Island. The Cathedral is the mother-church of fledgling congregations in these areas, but in spite of such suburbanization, many faithful still commute to Williamsburg for services.

It is a weekday afternoon, and my tour begins at a three-quarter-sized back door, where we duck our heads as we enter the dim passageway. "People were small then, maybe," the Rector murmurs apologetically. With its booksale display, folding tables, and platform stage, the community hall looks like any church basement. Upstairs, the foyer is cramped and dark, though there are paintings on the walls and twin stairways curving up toward the choir loft. None of this prepares me for the interior of the Cathedral proper. Without nave or side chapels, it is a single, lofty space that somehow feels both square and round, with huge stained-glass windows on each wall and clerestory windows in a ring around the dome’s base. Screened by the iconostasis, the high altar is a holy of holies where women are not admitted, though I catch glimpses of gold reliquaries, murals, and embroidered altarcloths. A series of arched doorways — each framing its icon — pierce into this inner sanctum, and during services (as I discover the following Sunday) altar boys pop in and out in their sulfur-colored robes. A central door in the iconostasis is opened and closed at various points during Mass, "all symbolical about where is God," Father Wiaczeslaw explains.

Echoey and hushed, the air breathes incense and candlewax. The massive central pillars are lavishly faux-marbled; the walls are purply-blue and frescoed with icons. A 1.2 million dollar capital campaign is underway to repair the dome’s copper cladding — water damage is visible here and there, but the soaring hemisphere remains magnificent, blue-painted and studded with gold stars. An enormous crystal chandelier — pendants darkened by candle-smoke — hangs from the dome’s apex. And everywhere there are auxiliary altars, to St. Vladimir, to the Virgin, to St. Tikhon and St. Herman of Alaska, more modern Russian martyrs. Wherever my eye falls there are serious, angular faces and gilt haloes; there are crowded votive racks and filigreed metal banners inlaid with enameling; there is a baptismal font, a holy water font, and a movable communion altar.

Father Wiaczeslaw is telling me about the Orthodox rite of confession. "Is closer, more intimate than Catholic, where priest is behind a grille," he says, but I don’t understand. So — after making sure that I won’t follow him — he slips through one of the iconostasis doors and comes back wearing his confessional vestment, a brocaded stole hanging almost to the floor. I kneel as he shows me, on the prie-dieu before the confessional altar. The priest stands beside me and casts the heavy cloth over my head and shoulders, so that I am in effect hugged toward him, though he can’t see my face and I can’t see his. He is right. It is a startlingly intimate, protective gesture, and for some reason my eyes fill with tears.

So the next Sunday, I go to Mass. The 1002 lb. bell starts tolling as I hurry up Driggs Avenue — one woman in a bright red coat is going up the steps but the sidewalk is deserted, and when I enter only about thirty people are scattered in the pews. In front of me, a tiny woman with white braids pinned in an elaborate knot is kneeling; the altar boys in their NY Rangers jackets arrive late and scurry through the holy-of-holy doors; a grandmother in a flowered headscarf holds a pink-suited toddler up before the Altar of the Virgin. It’s sunny and the stained glass appears bejewelled, but a more amazing light dances and refracts from the hundreds of votives burning on the altars. The choir begins. Father Wiaczeslaw has assured me that the Cathedral’s acoustics are better than those at Carnegie Hall, and the sound is wonderful — I assume that I am hearing a full chorus, but later I realize there are just ten singers in the choir loft, men on one side, women on the other.

The formal mass begins, though people are still entering, stopping at the ushers’ desk to purchase yellow votive tapers, which they offer at the shrines of their choice, pausing first to kiss the relevant icon. Suddenly the place is full, children standing on tiptoe to light their candles, old ladies kissing each other as they step into their pews, old men settling heavily onto the kneelers. The gospel text, read in English and then Slavonic, tells the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man — "and Lazarus lay before the Rich Man’s gate and the dogs licked his sores, and the Rich Man wore raiment of purple and linen." The sermon discourses on free will and responsibility. In front of me, the white-braided lady is singing softly along with the choir — a retired soprano, perhaps? — and when the harassed mother and stoic father behind me have had enough, they send the oldest of their four kids to sit with her. Whether she is the boy’s grandmother, godmother, or simply someone he’s known all his life I can’t tell, but he is mugging at her affectionately and she is correcting the position of his fingers as he crosses himself. The squad of altar boys serves communion; worshippers line up for a final blessing; Father Wiaczeslaw reminds us that proceeds from the choir’s CDs and cassettes on sale after Mass will buy a slice of bread for Russian orphans. I slip out into the chilly sunshine, oddly exalted.

Frances Richard writes poetry and criticism and is non-fiction editor of the literary journal Fence. She teaches at The New School University.