St. Elijah Church

St. Elijah's Church is the most ancient religious building in Orsha. According to legend, the wooden church of St. Elijah the Prophet was built in Orsha around 1460 at the behest of the king and Grand Duke Casimir IV (son of Sophia Drutskaya-Golshanskaya) in memory of the salvation of his wife Elizabeth.

Bathing on the day of the Prophet Elijah, she almost drowned.

Church canons prescribe the construction of churches on the highest and most beautiful place, so St. Elias Church was placed opposite the castle on the left bank of the Dnieper. The building was wooden and soon burned down. Already in 1505, a new wooden church was built in its place by Princess Sofya Yurievna. According to legend, in 1706, during the Northern War, the Russian Tsar Peter I prayed in the Ilyinsky Church for the granting of victory over the Swedes. In 1880, on the site of an ancient dilapidated building, a new, already stone church of Elijah the Prophet was erected.

The church building, an architectural monument of the pseudo-Russian style, has a cross-domed composition and consists of the main volume, the porch-bell tower, the Babinets (refectory) and the five-sided apse with two side sacristies attached to it. The main volume of the church is covered with a hemispherical dome and completed with a large onion head. The same heads, only smaller, have a bell tower and a five-sided apse. The entrance to the temple is highlighted by a characteristic for Russian temple architecture of the 17th century. 4-column locker, completed with a domed tent.

The walls of the main volume are cut through with beautiful three-arched windows. The facade of the building is richly decorated with a variety of architectural elements, painted in white and blue tones, which gives it a special expressiveness, lightness and beauty.

In 1996, the women's Holy Assumption Monastery was revived at the temple. Here is a copy of the Orsha Icon of the Mother of God, painted in the 18th century. in the Iversky monastery.