This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Russia gathers three cities that trace Russian Orthodoxy from its medieval monastic roots to its status as the seat of Moscow's own claim to be a third Rome.
Veliky Novgorod holds the Cathedral of Saint Sophia, built 1045 to 1050 to replace an earlier tenth century oaken cathedral, the oldest surviving Orthodox church building in Russia. During the medieval Novgorod Republic the cathedral served as the city's ceremonial and spiritual center, and it remains an active church today after decades as a Soviet era museum, returned to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1991.
Sergiyev Posad, northeast of Moscow, grew up around the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, founded around 1337 to 1340 by Sergius of Radonezh as a small forest hermitage that developed into the most important monastery in Russia and, from 1993, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Sergius is venerated as the patron saint of Russia; tradition credits him with blessing Prince Dmitri Donskoi before the 1380 Battle of Kulikovo. Closed under Soviet rule in 1920 and reopened in 1946, the Lavra remains the seat of the Moscow Theological Academy today.
Moscow became the center of Russian Orthodoxy when the metropolitan see moved there in the fourteenth century, and after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 Russian churchmen developed the idea of Moscow as a third Rome. A patriarchate was established there in 1589, abolished by Peter the Great, and restored in 1917 on the eve of the Soviet campaign against religion, which closed and destroyed churches across the city; the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, demolished under that campaign, was rebuilt in the 1990s.
From a republic's cathedral to a hermitage to the patriarchal seat itself, the three trace one church's authority moving steadily toward its capital.