Church Spiers
One of the main and most recognizable architectural masterpieces of Samara is the building of the Catholic Church on Frunze Street. Its red graceful 37-meter-high Gothic spiers, literally piercing the sky, are clearly visible both in the panorama of the street and from the Volga.
Almost from the moment of its foundation, Samara attracted representatives of various nations and faiths. In addition to the Orthodox, Muslims appeared in the city (mainly Tatars and Bashkirs). Later, Lutherans, Jews, and Catholics settled here. Everyone needed their cult buildings. Compared with the religious buildings of other faiths, the history of the construction of the Catholic church in Samara was perhaps the longest and full of unexpected twists.
The question of building a Catholic church in Samara was raised by Egor Nikitich Annaev, a merchant of the First Guild, and later the owner of a well-known Russian Empire koumiss hospitals.
Catholic church
By the middle of the XIX century, the city already had a fairly large and influential Catholic community. Actually, one of the most influential Catholics in the city is a merchant of the First Guild, and later the owner of a well-known kumysolechnika in the Russian Empire, Egor Nikitich Annaev - raised the question of building a Catholic church. They began to build the current building of the Lutheran church. But the Polish uprising of 1863 broke out, and the Catholics in Samara were denied the right to build a temple. Since many Polish families from the banks of the Volga were sent to Siberia, the required number of parishioners was not recruited for the church. Only in 1887 the Poles were still allowed to build a church. First, a house of worship was erected - a wooden religious building, which is now located behind a modern brick building (architect T.S. Hilinsky) Services were held in it, and a priest lived on the second floor. And only in 1906 the first service was held in the new Samara architectural masterpiece - the red-brick church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, familiar to every Samaritan.
Only in 1887 the Poles were allowed to build a church. But it began to be built in 1902.
The architectural design of the church is very unusual for Samara. Neo-Gothic buildings were very popular in the modern era. But in the province of buildings with Gothic elements in vain (for example, the Subbotina mansion on 30 Alexei Tolstoy Street). The church began to be built in 1902 according to the project of a Moscow architect of Polish origin Thomas Osipovich Bogdanovich forces of Samara architects under the leadership Shcherbacheva and builders. The Volga church also has an "older brother", who, however, has outgrown his predecessor. In 1904, in Moscow on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street, the same Bogdanovich erected a very similar architecture church of the Immaculate Conception, which surpasses the Samara counterpart in size. But during the Great Patriotic War, the Moscow church was badly damaged and acquired its original form only after restoration work carried out in the 1990s. The Samara Catholic Church was preserved in its original form.
In Soviet times, the building of the Catholic Church housed a children's theater, a cinema and a theater college, and then a builders club.
Interestingly, the prototype of these buildings is not so easy to find. The flowering of Gothic ended in the XVI century, and it was replaced by other styles of Catholic cult architecture. But if you take a walk around Vilnius, you can see the beautiful temple of St. Anne, which bears a striking resemblance to Samara, only more than four centuries older than it. Probably, it was Bogdanovich who used it as a prototype of his Samara and Moscow buildings.
In Soviet times, the church was closed. The building of the Catholic Church housed a children's theater, a cinema and a theater college, and then a builders club. The administration of the latter institution tried to rebuild the inside of the church, filling it with reinforced concrete structures and making it inside multi-story. Fortunately, the building was recognized as an architectural monument and was never rebuilt. Since 1938 the museum housed in the church, which allowed to keep it in good condition until 1991. Only crosses from the spiers and the organ were lost.