The Temple of All Religions (The Ecumenical Temple) in Kazan: Religions and Art at the Crossroads of Cultures

Introduction. The Temple of All Religions (the Ecumenical Temple / the Universal Temple) in Kazan, under construction since 1994, is a unique architectural structure for Russia, the purpose of which, according to the creators - brothers Ildar and Ilgiz Khanov - is to show religious traditions of the world and to form mutually respectful relations between people of different religions. The purpose of the article is to identify the prerequisites for the emergence of the Temple of All Religions in the religious situation in Russia at the turn of the 20th - 21st centuries. Content. The author reconstructs the history of the Temple of All Religions, analyzes the intentions of its creators, and describes its internal structure. This project can be included in the trend of development of ecumenical and interreligious architecture in Europe and the USA, which is associated with the support of interreligious dialogue. At the same time, the neutrality of "rooms of silence", excluding any religious symbols, is not analogous to the neutrality of the Temple of All Religions, which, on the contrary, emphasizes the specificity of the religious and artistic traditions of the world's religions, but at the same time, no religious cult is carried out in the Temple. The common thing is the preference for individual forms of spirituality. Aesthetic analysis shows the leading role of the decorative principle in the design of the temple, the open nature of the "sculpture-building", a combination of traditions and artistic innovations in the presentation of religious symbols. Conclusions. The project of the Temple of All Religions is turning at the beginning of the 21st century from a private artistic creation into one of the brands of the Republic of Tatarstan. This is due to the fact that the territory of Tatarstan has long been a crossroads of cultures. It is possible to state a correlation between the interpretations of the ideas of this temple and the specifics of the religious situation in a particular period of time. Thus, if in the 1990s - early 2000s the main goal was seen as educational and therapeutic, then in the early 2020s this project is seen as a unique synthesis of the spiritual values of traditional religions of Russia, a spatial embodiment of the idea of the crossroads of cultures. The appearance of the temple is an original embodiment of the artistic and religious concept of its creators, one of the manifestations of the dialogue between religion and art at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries.