Well, finally Harvard University decided to return what belongs to Russian people.

June 2, 2008, 9:55


Russian church bells that have been ringing out at Harvard University for almost 80 years will soon return to their home at the Danilov monastery in Moscow. Harvard is hosting a bell festival to mark the return and have invited guests from Russia to take part.
The bells were taken from Russia in the 1930s by the wealthy U.S. philanthropist Charles Crane, who bought them in the Soviet Union in the time of the religious purges.

On Thursday, the historic bells will ring in the U.S. for the last time at a graduation ceremony.
Later this summer they will be replaced by a new set made by a Russian foundry under an agreement between Harvard and the Russian Orthodox Church.

The first of 18 bells was replaced last year.

VIDEO - RussiaToday : News : U.S. and Russia swap church bells


Project manager Peter Riley (right) watches as a new Russian-cast bronze bell is hoisted skyward. The new bell replaces the old, at right, which since 1930 has hung in the gold-domed cupola of Baker Library.
Staff photo Rose Lincoln/Harvard News Office



After 78 years at Harvard, Danilov Bells will return to Russia

By Steve Bradt
FAS Communications

After 78 years of refuge at Harvard University, iconic Russian bells saved from Stalinist efforts to eradicate religious artifacts will return permanently this summer to their one-time home, the Danilov Monastery in Moscow.
The Danilov Bells — known on the Harvard campus as the Lowell House Bells, after the residential building in whose tower they have hung since 1930 — will be replaced by a set of 17 new bells cast by a Russian foundry under terms agreed to by Harvard and the Russian Orthodox Church.
Removal of the Danilov Bells from Lowell House will start in late June, and installation of replacement bells will begin in mid-July.
“Over the years, students developed many styles of ringing the bells, and the ears of generations of Harvard students have become accustomed to their distinctive sound,” says Diana L. Eck, master of Lowell House and professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard. “Indeed, no great Harvard ceremony is complete without them.”
In addition to ringing at joyous occasions like Harvard’s annual commencement exercises, the bells have tolled over the years to mark somber events such as the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

After 78 years at Harvard, Danilov Bells will return to Russia — The Harvard University Gazette



The Danilov Monastery purports to be the oldest in Moscow and was founded in 1282 by Prince Daniil Moskovsky, the youngest Son of Alexander Nevsky. Daniil was the first Grand Prince of the new Muscovite Rus and was buried here in the monastery in 1303 and later canonized. Like the city's other monasteries (Novodevichy, Donskoy, Simonov, Novospassky and Andronikov), which were all built between the 13th and 16th centuries, Danilov was not merely a center of religious and spiritual life and a seat of scholarly learning, but a powerful defensive fortress whose walls defended Moscow from attacks by enemy Tartars, Lithuanians and Poles.

Moscow's six major monasteries were all protected by thick, high walls and towers that together formed a defensive half-ring around the city. In 1591 Danilov Monastery played a crucial part in defending the capital of Rus from raids by the Crimean Tartars led by Khan Kazy Girei. In December 1606, the monastery was again the site of a major battle, when the Russian peasant army led by Ivan Bolotnikov fought valiantly but unvictoriously against the troops of Tsar Vasily Shuisky.

The monastery was home not only to monks, but the refuge of many laymen, including the writer Gogol, the musician Rubinshtein and the philosophers Samarin and Khomyakov, founders of the 19th century Slavophile movement, all of whom were buried in the monastery's cemetery.
After 1917 the monastery was one of the last to be closed down and became the refuge of many priests who had been evicted by the Bolsheviks from their own churches and who disagreed with the ethics of the new regime. They became known as "Danilovtsy". In 1930 the monastery was closed and many of its oldest relics and icons disappeared and have never been recovered. In 1931 a statue of Lenin was erected in the central courtyard of the monastery and the buildings were converted into a juvenile reform center. In May of that year the remains of Gogol, Rubinshtein, the Khomyakovs and the poet Nikolai Yazykov, were exhumed from their graves and reburied in Novodevichy Cemetery, and the churchyard destroyed to make room for the construction of new buildings to house the inmates of the reformatory. Most of the inmates of the institution were children whose parents had been arrested or shot during Stalin's purges of the 1930s.

It was only in 1983, over fifty years after its closure, that Daniilov Monastery was returned to the Church and became the official residence of the Moscow Patriarch and the seat of the Holy Synod, which had previously been housed at the Trinity Monastery of St. Sergei, just outside Moscow. In exchange for the return of the monastery, the Church was pressured into financing the establishment of another juvenile reform center elsewhere in the city.
Today many of the monastery's original structures are still standing and have been renovated and augmented with new buildings to house the modern residence of the Patriarch and the administration buildings of the Synod. The monastery's impressive surviving brick walls and towers were added to the monastery complex in the 17th century. Visitors enter the monastery ramparts through the Gate-Church of St. Simeon the Stylite, which was built in 1732 but reconstructed after being torn down in the 1920s by Soviet authorities and its bells sold to Harvard University. The gateway is painted a soft pink, guarded by stout columns and an elaborate cornice and topped by a triple-tiered bell tower decorated with pictures of the Saints. Inside the compound stands the austere Trinity Cathedral, built in 1833 by the architect Osip Bove and featuring plain yellow portico-ed walls topped by a single green cupola. Visitors will also notice the gold-domed Millennium Chapel, adorned with a quadruple arch and built on the site of the earlier statue of Lenin to mark the millennial anniversary of the establishment of Christianity in Russian in 1988. It was impossible to restore the graves destroyed when the cemetery was obliterated by the Bolsheviks, but the newly erected chapel stands as a memorial headstone for all those buried in the monastery grounds.

Danilov Monastery in Moscow, Russia