Church of Zakhariya and Elisaveta

This church has another, full name: Resurrection Church. It is connected with the main altar of the lower level, dedicated to the Resurrection of Christ. The stone structure, with upper and lower floors, a southern side chapel, and domes, was built in the second half of the eighteenth century on the site of a wooden church. The side chapel is dedicated to Zakhariya and Elisaveta, and services are still held in the church today.

Mikhail Mukhin bought this plot for the church. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Tatar households stood all around, while Russian and Tatar families lived side by side in Lower Posad. Mukhin was a prosperous peasant who had settled in Tobolsk. He transferred the vacant land among Tatar houses to Silvestr Glovatsky, head of the Tobolsk Eparchy, who sought to spread Orthodoxy among local Muslims.

According to parish tradition, Silvestr did not announce in advance that he intended to build precisely here. He ordered wooden log frames prepared at Znamensky Monastery, supposedly for the monastery's hospital church. On August twenty-fourth, seventeen fifty-two, after the service, the metropolitan led a religious procession to Mukhin's plot. The logs were brought afterward. Silvestr consecrated the land and called on the participants in the procession to help the builders. Within a few days, the wooden church was ready.

Tatar residents tried to stop the construction. The same parish tradition says that Mukhin was nearly killed. Then the Tobolsk Tatars sent a complaint to Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, hoping to secure the church's removal from their settlement, but they were refused. The Orthodox parish became established among their homes.

On September fifth, the church was consecrated, and the date gave it its name. On that day, the church commemorated Zakhariya and Elisaveta, spouses whom the Gospel account calls the parents of Ioann the Baptist. Zakhariya served as a priest in the Jerusalem Temple; Elisaveta remained childless for a long time and bore a son only in old age. Empress Elizaveta had nothing to do with the name of the Tobolsk church: her name simply coincided with the day of consecration.

Five years later, a fire destroyed the wooden church and ninety-two Tatar households. Fyodor Soymonov, the new governor of Siberia, forbade the fire victims to rebuild on their former plots and assigned them a place above Yamskaya Sloboda, by the Irtysh River. The resettlers found it inconvenient. They could not get the decision overturned and eventually dispersed to relatives and Tatar villages.

On the cleared land, parishioners laid the foundations of a stone church in seventeen fifty-nine, completed by seventeen seventy-six. It is the church that stands here now, and services are held in it again. The main altar on the lower floor is dedicated to the Resurrection of Christ, which is why the building's full name is Resurrection Church. The southern side chapel retained its dedication to Zakhariya and Elisaveta, and the people of Tobolsk continued to call the whole church by their names. The wooden log structure assembled on Mukhin's plot has long been gone; its name remained with its stone successor.