PECULIARITIES OF PLANNING St. Sophia Church in HARBIN
This article was prepared as part of master`s thesis. Research directed to the Orthodox Church architecture of the period end of 20 <sup>th</sup> – beginning of the 21 <sup>st</sup> century and devoted to studying of churches which was constructed on «sample». St. Sofia Church was completed in 1932, 38 years after construction of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in the Borki station. The purpose of research is to follow the row of these churches, find out the “kindship”, and observe the geographic and chronological sequence of construction. Architecture of Harbin is closely associated with the activity of outstanding Russian architects. Russian émigré architects, who were forced to leave their motherland due to revolution events of the first half of XX century, made an active construction of orthodox churches. There were about 22 orthodox buildings in Harbin, just five of which are remained at present moment. This number includes The Church of St. Sophia. The church was built by Russian architect Mikhail Matveyevich Oskolkov, during his emigration period. By tragic coincidence, the year of the completion of the Harbin church coincides with the mass destruction of churches in Soviet Russia. The design of St. Sophia presumably was taken from Blagoveshchensk, where at that moment was already functioned the Church of Holy Trinity, absolutely identical from the overall size to stylistic solutions and decoration character. In the publication, Harbin – Russian Atlantis, N.P. Kradin describes in detail this phenomenon and finds out the prototype of the church in Blagoveshensk – Church of the Epiphany on Gutuevsky Island in St. Petersburg, which is found out in the research, became a sample not only in Blagoveshchensk, but also in many other Russian cities.