Description of the attraction
After her accession to the throne in 1741, Empress Elizaveta Petrovna decided to build a Maiden Monastery in St. Petersburg in order, according to legend, to be able to retire to it in old age, transferring the government to her nephew Pyotr Fedorovich. Here she dreamed of being buried. To this end, the empress handed over her summer palace "Smolny" to the church, and the first 20 nuns who arrived from the Goritsky monastery began monastic life here. At the beginning of the reign of Catherine II, the monastery acquired a new status: a school was established in it for the education of girls from noble families, which was later transformed into the Smolny Institute, and monastic life in it ceased to exist after the death of the last nuns.
The Resurrection Novodevichy Convent was renewed in the reign of Emperor Nicholas I at the suggestion of his daughter, Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna. In 1848, a large plot of land was allocated to the monastery near the Moscow Triumphal Gates along the Tsarskoye Selo road. The author of the project of the main monastery buildings was the architect N. Ye. Efimov, and after his death - N. A. Sychev.
The first to be built was the wooden church of the Kazan Icon of God. From 1849 to 1861, a two-story five-domed monastery cathedral in the Russian-Byzantine style was built - the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ. A large golden dome and four small domes on high drums with cut windows crown this five-domed cathedral, which stands on a high basement. It faces Moskovsky Prospekt with its high arched portal.
The majestic Resurrection Cathedral amazed the parishioners with its splendor. The frescoes of the cathedral were made by the painters of the monastery. The images of the temple were also painted by his nuns. The cathedral had a beautiful five-tiered semicircular pre-altar iconostasis. In the church there was a miraculous icon of the Smolensk Mother of God Hodegetria, painted by Abbess Theophany.
The cell buildings housed house churches with five small domes and bell towers. They have survived to this day, however, without domes and bell towers. The most beautiful in St. Petersburg, seventy-meter gate bell tower, similar to the bell tower of Ivan the Great in the Moscow Kremlin, erected in 1892-1895 under the leadership of academicians Benoit and Zeidler, completing the ensemble of the monastery and bringing its silhouette closer to the contours of ancient Russian monasteries, was destroyed in 1933.
Various workshops worked at the monastery: drawing, painting, gold embroidery, chasing, carpet, shoe, cook, prosphora. Farms, orchards and vegetable gardens were organized in it, a bee-eater appeared - all this was in exemplary order with the delight of the nuns. And their works were highly valued not only in tsarist Russia, but also abroad. An orphanage, a parish and Prince Vladimir church-teaching school for free education were opened here, which had their own Vvedenskaya church.
Tyutchev, Nekrasov, Maikov, Vrubel, Feofanov, Golovin, Botkin, Nevelsky, Chigorin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Bagration, Napravnik, Lyadov and many other famous figures of science and culture, military and statesmen, in including the builder of the monastery, the architect Efimov.
In 1925, the monastery was closed, and only in 1990 the monastery shrines began to return here. Since 1997, an almshouse for the sick and the elderly has been opened in the monastery. There is a children's choir, a Sunday school, and a charitable social center for children from disadvantaged families. In 2003, divine services began in the monastery.
