Russia's Holy Shrines

...Give these warriors into my hand, and, old as I am, I will not spare myself nor turn my back upon the Tartars...

...Thereby began the emancipation of the Russian Church from the patriarchate of Constantinople...

...The latter did not reply, only pointed to the chest which at that very moment, and at all hours of the day and night, was receiving the offerings of the long array of pilgrims...

...Behind those banks is a hill range, high for the level steppes of Russia, and therefore called Kieff, "the Mountain...

...Its real founder was Vladimir, pagan prince of Kieff, a descendant of the Norman Rurik...

...The population of Kieff arose in protest, and serious consequences might have followed, had not the Virgin herself appeared to the aged Peter, metropolitan of Kieff, and told him not to worry, because he would find the next morning another ikon in place of the one he ought to allow Ivan to remove...

...When Ivan III wavered, as Demetrius had wavered, it was by the Archbishop Bassian, formerly prior of the Troitza convent, that he was driven to the field...

...One is somehow reminded of the famous conversation of the French philosopher Diderot with the Archbishop Plato, when at the request of the great Catherine he came to dispute with him in this very Alexander Nevsky monastery, now in course of demolition...

...Very soon it became the necropolis of all the nobility and illustrious writers, poets and historians of the so-called St...

...Finally he accepted the invitation of Basil Porphyrogenete, emperor of Byzantium, and sent ambassadors to Czarograd, as Constantinople was called, with instructions to report to him what they had seen there in regard to religious worship...

...One wonders what can have become of it...

...the second which lasted from the days of the Tartar conquest to the accession of Peter the Great...

...And there was a plain wooden chalice used by Saint Sergius...

...Kotchoubey, the famous supporter of Peter the Great, whom Mazeppa caused to be beheaded, lies there, and Stolypine the celebrated Minister of Nicholas II is also buried in the beautiful cemetery overlooking the Dnieper, under the old walls which in the seventeenth century withstood the attacks of Chmielnicki's cossacks and of the Tartars of the Crimean khan...

...Hither from all parts of the country, before the Bolsheviks closed it, came innumerable pilgrims...

...It became known as Our Lady of Vladimir...

...Two other convents in the suburbs of Moscow preserved the recollection of that day...

...And so he passed on by the north to Italy...

...These monks called Per-esvet and Osliab, accompanied the prince to the field of battle, and fought in coats of mail drawn over their monastic habit...

...There shall be a great city, and God shall cause many churches to rise within it...

...Food was thrown to them through holes in the floor of the great cathedral which occupied the centre of the convent, and it was only when one of these men died that the metropolitan of Kieff himself entered the cell which he had occupied, and threw a shroud over the body, after which the cell was sealed forever...

...The soul of the movement in the convent itself was the bursar, Abraham Palitzyn, who led the men who finally drove back the Polish assailants from the walls of the beleaguered fortress...

...Thou too must die as well as others...

...Peter the Great twice took refuge within its sacred walls...

...With some difficulty Anna was induced to sacrifice herself to the barbarian prince who had himself forthwith baptized at Kherson, and then issued orders for a great general baptism of his people at Kieff...

...Basil, for reasons of his own, wanted an alliance with Vladimir...

...the other was the Simonoff cloister, founded by the nephew of Sergius of Radoneje, on a beautiful spot chosen by the saint himself, and its earliest site was consecrated by the tomb which covered the bodies of his two warlike monks...

...The most interesting of the three is undoubtedly the first one, during which Russia became converted to Christianity at Kieff on the banks of the Dnieper, the old Borysthenes of Roman and Greek times...

...none avoid it...

...Is it possible that they have thrown it away on the junk heap ? The glories and historical associations of Kieff were all centered in the Petchersk monastery, those of Moscow were identified with that of Troitza...

...Both monastery and cloister have been dynamited by the present rulers of Moscow...

...Sergius blessed him, and told him to go fighting again, and sent him toward the Don to meet the enemy once more, giving him two of his monks for companions...

...The aged prelate asked: Dost thou fe'ar death...

...Vladimir was still hesitating, but as he was just then besieging the city of Kherson in the Crimea, he vowed he would be baptized if he succeeded in taking it...

...once asked the Emperor Nicholas I of the prior...

...It could not have tempted the cupidity of the Bolsheviks...

...When Ivan III, grand duke of Moscow, built the Church of the Assumption in the Moscow Kremlin as a lasting monument of his marriage with Sophy Paleologue, the daughter of the last emperor of Byzantium, in 1467, he wanted to have Our Lady of Vladimir brought to Moscow...

...Ivan returned to the caittp, the khan of the Golden Horde fled without a blow, and Russia was set free forever from the Mongol yoke...

...He gathered around him a few companions, and they built the first of the many edifices which now compose the immense pile known as the Troitza (Holy Trinity) monastery...

...As Demetrius of the Don had received his blessing from Saint Sergius, so Prince Pojarsky and Minime, chief of one of the merchant guilds of Nijni-Novgorod-received their mission from the successor of Sergius, the Abbot Di-onysius...

...The whole people of Kieff were immersed in the river, and the spot where this took place was consecrated by the first Christian church which in time was surrounded by a monastery, called Petchersk...

...while the third, the so-called St...

...It is situated something like sixty miles from Moscow, amid vast forests where lived its founder, the holy hermit, Sergius of Radoneje, whose career is encircled with a halo of legend...

...It was during his reign that the first Christian missionaries appeared in dark Russia...

...He then sent new messengers to the Emperor Basil, demanding from him the hand of his sister Anna, in marriage, under the promise of his own conversion, and, in case of a refusal, under the threat of doing to Constantinople what he had done to Kherson, most of the inhabitants of which he had slaughtered...

...This was in January, 1613, and six weeks later Michael Romanoff, the founder of his dynasty, was elected czar of Russia...

...From that day Saint Sergius stood out as the champion of Russia in its national recollections...

...Kieff became henceforward the Canterbury of the Russian empire...

...Whole pages of Russian history have been torn when shrines like the Iberian Chapel in Moscow or the Isaac Cathedral in St...

...death is the lot of all, man, beast, and bird alike...

...As for the ikon of Our Lady of Vladimir, no one knows what fate has befallen it...

...This also happened, and ever since that time Kieff and Moscow have been quarreling in regard to the authenticity of their respective ikons, each of them claiming the possession of the one brought over from Kherson by Vladimir...

...Vladimir had brought with him from Kherson to Kieff a picture of the Blessed Virgin, which was believed to have been painted by Constantine the Great, and which he deposited in the cathedral standing in the midst of the many buildings which were contained within the walls of the Petchersk monastery...

...Its warlike traditions revived in the persons of its soldier-like monks...

...From the summit a magnificent prospect extends down the course of the river, up which, according to the ancient legend, came on his way from Sinope to Rome, Andrew, the Apostle of Greece and of Scythia...

...The monastery was also the burial place of many illustrious Ukrainian families...

...Petersburg epoch...

...This happened in the year 1010, Vladimir's baptism having taken place in 988...

...One was the Donskoy monastery, under the Sparrow Hills...

...and as he rose in the morning and saw the heights of Kieff, he said: "See you those hills...

...and he received his envoys with joy, leading them himself to Saint Sophia, the glorious church erected by Justinian...

...It seems almost impossible that people have been found capable of destroying these monuments of the past...

...Petersburg have destroyed associations one had thought would survive through centuries...

...In the three cemeteries which it contains Dostoievsky, Gont-charoff, Karamzine are buried, Souvoroff rests, some of the Decembrists have found eternal peace...

...Whence do you derive your support for all this state...

...The Russians were so much struck by what they saw that they reported to Vladimir that they had heard angels sing hymns of praise to the Christian God...

...And it was there that Demetrius later called Donskoy, grand duke of Moscow, fled for safety, after having failed in his advance against the Tartars...

...The destruction of monasteries like the Petchersk cloister in Kieff, the Troitza convent near Moscow, and the Alexander-Nevsky one in St...

...It is a beautiful spot...

...Moscow was retaken, and in the Trinity monastery the prior presided at the council which terminated the war...

...Petersburg have been either desecrated or removed from the spots where they have stood for centuries...

...The terrible Ivan built at least half of its stately edifices...

...The Petchersk monastery was famous not only for the riches contained in its numerous churches, cathedrals and palaces, but also for its library where most precious Greek and Slavonic manuscripts were preserved, and also for the subterranean monastery which existed under it, a monastery inhabited by holy hermits who retired there for life, and never looked again at the light of the day after they had voluntarily immured themselves in their narrow cells...

...RUSSIA'S HOLY SHRINES By CATHERINE RADZIWILL THE Soviet's attempt to destroy religion is also an attempt to wipe out of the unfortunate country all remembrances of the national glory which once was hers...

...These three famous shrines incarnated in themselves the three great periods of Russian history, the first one of which ended when the grand duke of Kieff became czar of Muscovy...

...The Troitza monastery like the Moscow Kremlin combined the various institutions of monastery, university, palace, cathedral and churches, planted within a circuit of walls which by their height and strength indicate that it was built as a fortress as well as a convent...

...The office of its archimandrite, or abbot, was so high that it was never given to anyone but the metropolitan of Moscow...

...to which Plato instantly retorted "Dixit stultus in corde suo, 'Non est Deus.1...

...By his command the huge wooden idol Peroun was thrown into the Dnieper, where it was guided and pushed along the stream, till it finally disappeared down the rapids in a spot still known as the Bay of Peroun...

...Now it has been dismantled, its churches have been closed, and its great cathedral turned into an antireligious museum...

...The convent was for the time the whole of Russia, and its victory was the deliverance of Russia...

...Later on, when the Poles had become masters of Moscow, and King Sigismund-Augustus entered the Kremlin as its master, the Trinity convent alone resisted his attacks...

...Its actual chief, the hegoumenos or prior, was himself one of the highest dignitaries of Russia, and lived in a style of magnificence almost equal to that of a sovereign...

...It was the grand prince, or duke, Ivan I, who in the very midst of the Tartar invasion founded Moscow and built or rather began building the Kremlin at the instance of Peter, metropolitan of Kieff, later of Moscow...

...Diderot began his argument with the words "Non est Deus...

...For on those hills shall hereafter shine forth the grace of God...

...It was from his convent that the noblest patriotic inspirations were drawn...

...Accordingly he founded, in the year 1724, the monastery of Alexander Nevsky whither he had brought and entombed under a magnificent sarcophagus of pure silver the relics of Saint Alexander Nevsky, who in 1246 had defeated the Swedes on the same field upon which arose the new convent...

...No emperor ever came to Moscow without praying before the relics of its saints...

...Approximately in the year 986 they held long conversations with Vladimir, who for a time wavered as' to what he ought to do...

...The treasury of the convent contained diamonds, pearls and other precious stones which were supposed to exceed in beauty and value the famous Russian crown jewels...

...I was about to say, a holy spot...

...The ground was supposed to preserve their remains from decay, and pilgrims frequently prayed before them...

...Peter the Great, when he built his new capital on the banks of the Neva, realized that he should build another shrine, capable of drawing around it some at least of the people who were worshiping the saintly relics of the Kremlin, or of the old city which had been the scene of the nation's conversion to Christianity...

...Petersburg period, came to an end with the fall of the Romanoffs...

...This was the legendary beginning of what became in time the great Russian empire...

...At that time, also, was founded the monastery of Troitza, which up to the fall of the Romanoffs remained the chief sanctuary of the Russian Church...