THE CATHEDRAL IN THE 19TH CENTURY

In 1812 the Archangel Cathedral was desecrated and ransacked by Napoleon's soldiers, who used the altar as a kitchen and packed the сathedral with barrels of wine. When the French army withdrew, the vexed French soldiers crashed those barrels and the wine literally flooded the cast-iron floor of the cathedral. Precious frameworks from icons and shrines were torn away and stolen.

The Archangel Cathedral was the first among the Kremlin temples put in order, and on the 1 February 1813 it was sanctified, «with the religious procession and concourse, the remains of St Tsarevich Dmitry were carried round the cathedral».

In 1826, a one-storey «court-house of the Archangel patrimony» located by the southern wall was dismantled. Here justice was administered and punishment meted out to peasants delinquent in paying church-rate, obliged by authorized letters from princes and tsars to pay a fixed rent to the Archangel clergy. A two-storey pavilion for clergymen was built on that place, and in the 20th century it was reconstructed in a one-storey pavilion.  

In 1847 the Pokrovsky side chapel (Intercession of the Mother of God) was transferred to the third floor of the western appendix, thus making place for the side chapel of St Varus of the Church of the Nativity of St John the Precurser by the Borovitsky Gates, which was disassembled for the reason of dilapidation.

Since 1883 the Archangel cathedral was no more the metropolitan cathedral. This status was attributed to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, newly constructed by the design of K. A. Ton. Twelve years later, in 1895, the Archangel Cathedral, as been the Royal burial place, passed from eparchial to court authorities.