One can certainly stand still and listen at his or her leisure. Others may even miss it altogether, absorbed with the “urban fuss and traffic flows.” Still others may not only listen but count all the strikes…
Various calendars are now available, including the Orthodox calendar of bell chime! Thus on a weekday a bell at the belfry is to be clanged 40 times – 10 minutes before the morning liturgy and then some peal should be rung. Bell music artists see nothing wrong in this practice.
A light peal of bells after a worship service.
The same procedure is repeated before the evening liturgy. On big holidays, however, a festive bell joins the peal of everyday bells!
On January 30, bells in the Moscow churches (and in other cities) ring as on weekdays, which is rather surprising. Even though no special church festival is celebrated during this time, according to a popular belief, the world-famous Moscow mellow chime was born on January 30, 1487. Be that as it may, now January 30 is a festive day – the day of bell chime!
This is why it is surprising that Moscow belfries stick to a usual timetable on that day, given that there are other occasions to clang bells in a special way on January 30. In a similar way our ancestors sounded alarm in times of trouble. Even if nothing calls for tolling the tocsin today it would not hurt to rend people off their routine schedule to a commemoration of a remarkable event of the glorious past.
On January 30, 1930 the bell chime was banned in Moscow. On the same day similar decrees of the local authorities came into force in the Moscow region, Yaroslavl, Archangelsk and other cities. This work seemed to be well coordinated.
The year 1930 was special not only for bells but for belfries as well. It is in those days that the person in charge of atheism enforcement in the country, a certain Miney Israel Gubelman, better known as Emelyan Yaroslavsky, stated at the executive bureau of the Central Council of the Union of Militant Atheists: “Several years ago we timidly outlined a program of struggling against the bell chime…” By 1930 Miney Israel and his comrades-in-arms seemed to have shirked off all shyness and set to the ravage which Holy Rus did not see even in times of the Horde yoke.
They presented united front. Their initial tactic was to strip a church or monastery of the status of historical or architectural heritage; some time later mine men and battering rams arrived. On the sly they would throw bells off the towers and transported them to industrial facilities for recasting and recycling, given that copper was a precious commodity!
This is how Moscow lost the famous belfries of St. Simon and St. Andronik monasteries. But then a question arose: what should be done to the bells of those churches which had not been destroyed for various reasons? For to the infidel mind the bell is the enemy’s language! A proven ploy came in handy: the angry letters of common Soviet workers started flowing to central and local administrations. They read: how long shall we put up with this cursed legacy of the past?
The authorities were quick to respond with circular letters and resolutions forbidding the bell chime in the Russian cities and towns.
The Soviet power is among the most incredulous in the history of mankind. This quality was most graphically revealed in its treatment of bells. What was the reasoning of people in leather jackets and jerkins? The ringing was banned but bells were still hanging, which meant that sooner or later they would toll the tocsin, but this was inadmissible. And so smaller and especially bigger bells were cast down to the ground – the great bells from the Laura of the Holy Trinity and St. Sergius called Czar, Godunovsky and Crop-eared were destroyed…
The 30-ton Godunovsky Bell that was soon to celebrate its 300th anniversary perished in late January of 1930.
From 1930 on several dozens churches were annually ruined in Moscow. The rest were deprived of their bells or bell hammers. The city that was famous for the chime heard many miles away became numb.
In psychotherapy there is a theory extolling the positive therapeutic effects of bell chime. Maybe the loss of the once famous and branded Moscow amiability and proliferation of spite and aggression among the present-day dwellers of the capital city can be traced down to the destruction of church bells, apart from the housing issue and traffic jams?
Both in Moscow and in other cities of Russia churches and monasteries are regaining their once lost bell voices. But you’d agree that the bell chime in the capital is somewhat cautious and low-key even on the Day of Bell Chime.
The restless spirit of Emelyan Yaroslavsky whose ashes lie in the Kremlin wall must still be soaring over the belfries – not far from the Savior and St. Niche icons that were opened to us last year on Spasskaya and Nikolskaya towers of the Moscow Kremlin, or right in between behind the red granite mausoleum of Lenin.
Mikhail Bykov
