Behind the Kremlin shaft, at 55a Lenin Street, there is the Church of the Beheading of John the Baptist with a hipped-roof bell tower. Today this temple is surrounded by buildings, and initially it completed the southern border of the Market Square.
Short story
In the scribal book of Suzdal from 1617, the Baptist Church is referred to as a wooden one: “in the prison near the marketplace on the square there is a wooden dumpling church of the Beheading of John the Baptist”. In 1719, a fire damaged the building, but a year later the Church of St. John the Baptist was restored in stone and has survived to this day with some losses.... So, to this day, the winter stone church in the name of the image of the Savior Not Made by Hands, attached to the Baptist Church in 1734, has not survived.
There is an assumption that at the southern wall of the Church of the Beheading of John the Baptist was buried the Suzdal saint Trofim, who lived in the reign of Ivan the Terrible (XVI century). John the Baptist (aka the Baptist of the Lord), who predicted the coming of Jesus Christ, is one of the most revered saints in the Christian world. There are two churches dedicated to the Baptist in Suzdal. The second - the Church of the Nativity of John the Baptist - was built on the right low bank of the Kamenka River in tandem with the Epiphany Church.
Architecture of the Baptist Church
Being the same age as the Nikolsky Church in the Kremlin (1720), the Baptist Church has a three-part-axial composition, typical of Suzdal architecture of the early 18th century... The powerful cube of the main volume is covered with a metal four-pitched roof, on which one graceful cupola rests on a thin drum. Unlike the Nikolskaya Church in the Kremlin, the decor of the Forerunner Church is strict and laconic. In the appearance of the Church of John the Baptist, you can trace the features of chopped wooden churches of the 17th century.
The blades at the corners of the cubic volume imitate the ends of the logs, sheathed with planks (boards). The main decoration of the facades are windows with platbands and a small portal. From the east, the building is adjoined by a semicircular apse, and from the west - a low bell tower of the "eight-on-four" type. The octagon of the belfry ends with a tent with windows-rumors, and its quadruple rests on two semicircular pillars that form an arch-porch. The massiveness of the bell tower is concealed by the fact that its quadrangle is set in height with the main volume-cube.
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