The Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross is located in the so-called "southern" building, constructed between 1882 and 1887. This two-story building with a dome floor is designed in the classical style. The dome floor housed the church, while the first two floors contained the monastery's refectory, an art workshop, a hospital, a sacristy, and rooms for orphans raised in the monastery. The basement housed a bakery and a kvass brewery.

The first mention of the civil use of the Exaltation Church dates back to January 1929, when the community of the Theotokos Monastery submitted a petition to close the main summer cathedral. The rector of the Theotokos Church, Priest Alexander Lebedev, informed the NKVD that "the vacant Exaltation Church has already been transferred for state needs." This fact was not documented, and the authorities urgently considered the matter. On February 13, 1929, at a meeting of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the TASSR, it was decided to terminate the agreement, declare the church closed, and use the premises to expand School No. 12. The NKF was instructed to liquidate the property of the closed church. By the end of the month, the church was officially closed, as a primary school had long been located in its building. On March 1, the property of the Exaltation Church of the former Kazan Monastery was transferred to the State Fund, and the building itself was registered with the city’s communal services.

To this day, the Exaltation Church has been preserved in a modified form. For a long time, the building was used by the pedagogical institute, and in 2004 it was transferred to the restored Kazan-Theotokos Monastery.

On October 29, 2007, a small bell tower was built at the Exaltation Cathedral. Seven bells, weighing from 6 to 370 kilograms, were cast at the Ural plant "Pyatkov and Co" from bell bronze alloy and donated to the revived monastery by entrepreneurs from Yekaterinburg. Now, the ringing of the bells accompanies every service at the Exaltation Cathedral.

On April 27, 2013, on the eve of Bright Tuesday, Metropolitan Anastasius of Kazan and Tatarstan visited the Kazan-Theotokos Men's Monastery, where he consecrated the chapel of the Exaltation Cathedral in honor of the Holy Martyr Hermogenes, Patriarch of All Russia.