This property dispute has run for years and involved countless meetings with high-ranking government officials, dozens of court hearings, the police, and thousands of petitions and complaints.
What makes it different from other property disputes, however, is that the sparring parties -- the Russian Orthodox Church and the Grabar center, the country's leading state-owned restoration works -- both proclaim noble missions and are striving to revive Russian historical heritage in the ways they see best.
The simmering conflict flared up this month when Moscow's chief sanitary doctor, Nikolai Filatov, ordered the Igor Grabar All-Russian Art Restoration Center, which has occupied three church buildings in central Moscow since the 1940s, to shut down its operations, saying the premises lacked sufficient ventilation, lighting and showers for workers.
"When they [Orthodox Church members] understood that they could not physically evict us, they found a different way out," Alexei Vladimirov, director of the Grabar center, said while giving a reporter a tour of the workshops in the Protection of Our Lady Church of Martha and Mary Convent on Bolshaya Ordynka. Restorers worked under low-hanging fluorescent lamps, cleaning up old icons with cotton swabs dipped in alcohol and painting new icons commissioned by various churches.
"All of this is being done for the good of Orthodoxy, and it is the Orthodox who are waging war on us to push us out of this church," Vladimirov said. "We are ready to move, but we have to have a place to go. Neither the Moscow city government nor the federal government is offering us anything suitable."
The Orthodox side said it has done its best to help the Grabar center find new premises and accuse it of just not wanting to move.
The buildings under dispute are among the historical landmarks that President Boris Yeltsin decreed 10 years ago should be turned over to the Orthodox Church.
Vladimirov conceded that the center was never certified by sanitary or ecological inspectors from its founding in the 1940s until 2000, when inspectors came for the first time and ordered the center shut down -- shortly after the restorers were given a deadline to move and they failed to do so. That deadline was then delayed when the center promised to move. But on Jan. 10, Filatov signed an order stating that further delays would be "impossible."
After inspectors presented him with the order Jan. 13, Vladimirov issued an internal order to stop work and went to see Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi, who, in turn, called Health Minister Yury Shevchenko and his deputy, the country's chief sanitary doctor Gennady Onishchenko, Vladimirov said. Last Thursday, Onishchenko met with Deputy Culture Minister Natalya Dementyeva and Vladimirov and gave the restorers the go-ahead to resume work -- until July 1. He warned the center that this was the last deadline.
"We did not discuss the sanitary conditions -- we discussed when and how we will move out," Vladimirov said. "Onishchenko gave us six months."
Over the years, he said, the Moscow city government has offered the Grabar center several buildings, but they were too small, in too ill-repair or too far away from the center.
Another problem for the center is that it has found itself between the city and federal government. In 2000, the Culture Ministry allocated $3 million for the reconstruction of a building on Proyezd Durova but is not allowed to invest in a Moscow city-owned building. The city, in turn, has been unwilling to give up what Vladimirov described as ruins.
Vladimirov has proposed buying a building on the open market and has found, through realtors, an abandoned 5,000-square-meter former factory off Kutuzovsky Prospekt for $5 million.
At the same time, Vladimirov said he was asking for 7,000 to 10,000 square meters of space with large windows and high ceilings not far from the center. "Let the government think about it," he said.
The Grabar center currently occupies 5,628 square meters of space in three church buildings that are certain to require a major restoration when and if the restorers leave.
The three congregations that own the buildings are in different phases of regaining access to them and are using different tactics to get back the rest.
Vladimirov singled out the St. Catherine Church on Bolshaya Ordynka, which serves as the Moscow mission of the Orthodox Church in America, as the congregation that is on the friendliest terms with him and said its recently appointed young rector, Archimandrite Zacchaeus Wood, is helping the Grabar center lobby the government for a new building. Late last year, Wood and Vladimirov agreed to expand the church's part of the building.
"We have come to the common understanding that we share a mutual problem," Wood said this week in a written statement from Chicago. "I strongly urge all those who are in authority to deal with this very unfortunate situation to aid us in the speedy relocation of the Grabar center."
A second congregation is the Martha and Mary Convent of Sisters of Mercy, which was founded in 1908 by Grand Duchess Elizabeth after her husband was killed by a revolutionary terrorist. It is being revived today under the leadership of Mother Elizaveta Kryuchkova, who has regained, piece by piece, most of the convent's former buildings on Bolshaya Ordynka. With help from the city and the British royal family, Kryuchkova's order of 160 sisters already runs an orphanage for 20, sends humanitarian aid to Chechnya, helps care for the sick in hospitals and plans to re-open a clinic and drugstore.
Kryuchkova said that although she is disappointed that she can't use the convent's main church and that there are occasional conflicts between the convent and the restorers, she prefers to deal peacefully with the Grabar center.
"They are not leaving because they are dissatisfied with all the locations offered by the city," Kryuchkova said. "I am in favor of everything being settled in a law-abiding, civilized manner. We are the church after all!"
The most aggressive attitude is taken by the congregation of the Resurrection Church in Kadashi, near the Tretyakov Gallery, which owns the carriage house on the disputed premises and is led by Archpriest Alexander Saltykov, a professional art historian, employee of the Andrei Rublyov Museum of Ancient Russian Art and dean of the religious arts department at St. Tikhon Orthodox Theological Institute.
Saltykov's congregation at one point attempted to block restorers from entering the building -- the restorers called the police -- and it has sued Vladimirov for defamation.
Vladimirov blamed his trouble with sanitary inspectors on Saltykov's congregation and said the district sanitary doctor, Galina Antipova, was a member of Saltykov's parish.
"Unfortunately, that is not the case," Saltykov said by telephone Tuesday. "Mrs. Antipova is a very nice woman, but she doesn't talk to me at all."
He added, however, that the inspectors' decision was in the interests of the congregation.
"Thank God that at least the health inspectors performed their duties and, as a side effect, helped us," he said.
Saltykov said the Grabar center was simply unwilling to leave the buildings and was stalling by saying it couldn't find a suitable new building.
"For the first seven years, we lived in peace with them, and I dutifully ran around to government offices writing requests" for the center to get a new building," Saltykov said. "But then it turned out to be a bluff and no building was good for them."
Asked whether his congregation was being aggressive, Saltykov said it was "simply the most active."
"You have to push a little bit if you are being lied to all the time," he said.
Antipova could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
Andrei Tsirulin of the city health inspectorate said inspectors were simply performing their duties at the Grabar center. He said the decision to shut the works might push the government and the center to agree on a new location.