Lobnya

Lobnya is a town in Moscow Oblast, Russia, located 27 km north of Moscow. Population: 74,252 (2010); 30,000 (1970).

History

Lobnya was founded in 1902 and granted town status in 1961.

Architecture

The environs are rich in architectural monuments, such as the Neo-Gothic estate of Marfino located 9 km to the northeast, which was laid out by Field Marshal Pyotr Saltykov in the 1770s but was extensively modernized by Count Panin in 1837–1839. The palace is Gothic in style, scored to resemble a medieval castle; a flight of stairs connects it with a white-stone wharf by the river, decorated with statues of griffins. To the west from the palace stands the Petrine Baroque church of the Virgin's Nativity (1701–1707). There are also a Gothic bridge, stables, and two English parks with picturesque rotundas.

Within two kilometers from Marfino is the manor of Nikolskoye-Prozorovskoye, which contains a Neo-Baroque country house of Field Marshal Prozorovsky and a Neoclassical church of St. Nicholas, built in the 1790s. Nearby is Rozhdestveno-Suvorovo, where the five-domed church of the Virgin's Nativity was built by Princes Baryatinsky at the turn of the 18th century. In 1773, the estate passed to Alexander Suvorov's father, Vasily Suvorov, a general-in-chief who is buried in the church.

The oldest building in the vicinity is the five-domed four-pillared apseless Trinity Church in Chashnikovo (four kilometers from Lobnya). Its elegant Italianate decor, reminiscent of the Chudov Monastery cathedral, dates the church to the early years of the 16th century, when such Italian architects as Aloisio the New were active in Russia. The church was first documented in 1585, when Chashnikovo was owned by Nikita Romanov, grandfather of Tsar Mikhail I. By the end of the 17th century, the estate had passed to Lev Naryshkin, maternal uncle of Peter the Great, who added a bell tower and had the church's decor updated to answer his own Naryshkin Baroque tastes.

Other well-known villages in the vicinity of Lobnya are Zhostovo (seven kilometers to the northeast) and Fedoskino (ten kilometers to the east), renowned for their traditional folk crafts of Zhostovo painting and Fedoskino miniature, respectively. The village of Krasnaya Polyana, now located in Lobnya, was the place of closest advance by the German army to Moscow in 1941.

• St. Nicholas church in Prozorovskoye

• Church of the Holy Mandylion in Kiovo, Lobnya