Video: The abode of the rejected royal wives: How the Suzdal monastery turned into an aristocratic prison
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The Intercession Convent in Suzdal is one of the oldest in Russia. Its beautiful temples and miraculous shrines attract many pilgrims and tourists. But this place is also interesting because for many centuries the monastery served as a prison for royal prisoners. It was here that unwanted wives of tsars and women from aristocratic families ended their lives.
The monastery was founded in 1364 on the right bank of the Kamenka River. According to legend, it was in this place that a terrible storm seized the boat of the ruler of the Nizhny Novgorod-Suzdal principality, Andrei Konstantinovich. In the face of death, the prince promised, in case of salvation, to build a new nunnery on the shore, and the bad weather immediately subsided. Fulfilling the vow, the ruler founded a new monastery, however, from those first wooden buildings to our time, nothing remained.
The monastery was not remarkable for a long time, until the eldest daughter of Ivan III Alexander took vows here. From that moment on, the monastery in Suzdal became popular with the nobility. With each new nun from a noble family, the monastery received rather large gifts from relatives, as a result of which, over several centuries, all wooden buildings were replaced by stone ones. The Cathedral of the Intercession, the majestic gateway Church of the Annunciation and a massive wall with octagonal towers were rebuilt.
If historians are not exactly sure about Inokina Alexandra, it is possible that she took the tonsure voluntarily, although, perhaps, she became a hostage to the intrigues of her brother Ivan the Young against her father's second wife, Sophia Palaeologus. But most of the other noble women and girls came to this monastery not simply out of a desire to find peace from the bustle of the world. Several dozen noble captives were tonsured within the walls of the Intercession Monastery, and most of them were buried here. Women were exiled as inconvenient heiresses, some were wives who could not give birth to a son on time - the successor of a noble family, many took tonsure after the death of their husband on the chopping block.
Four nuns stand out in this sad list especially - they entered the monastery immediately from the royal throne. The first of them - nun Sophia, in the world was the wife of Vasily III. The Grand Duchess of Moscow Solomonia Saburova was once chosen as tsar from 500 brides gathered from all over the country. After 20 years of marriage, the queen never gave birth. The divorce of the sovereign and the exile of his ex-wife to a monastery have not yet happened in Russia. Vassian Patrikeev, Metropolitan Barlaam and the Monk Maxim the Greek, who opposed the dissolution of the marriage, were also exiled, and for the first time in Russian history the metropolitan was defrocked. In these ways, Ivan III went to a new marriage. Less than a year later, he married Elena Glinskaya.
(from the Notes of Sigismund von Herberstein, Holy Roman Diplomat)
There is a legend, which the same Herberstein retells, that the queen was pregnant during the tonsure, and that is why she resisted so fiercely. Allegedly, already in the Suzdal monastery, she gave birth to a boy, George, gave him up for foster care, and she herself arranged a false funeral for the child in order to ward off possible murderers from him. According to popular rumor, George was taken to the Kerzhen forests, where he was secretly brought up in forest monasteries, and the tsar's son who grew up later became the famous robber Kudeyar and brought a lot of excitement to his brother, Ivan the Terrible.
The nun Sophia gradually came to terms with her fate, she lived like an ordinary nun and after her death was canonized as the Monk Sophia of Suzdal. After her, the same fate befell the fifth wife of Ivan the Terrible, Anna Vasilchikova (just a year after the wedding, she bored the sovereign) and the wife of Vasily Shuisky (Queen Maria Buinosova-Rostovskaya turned into Nun Elena). The last royal prisoner of the holy place was Evdokia Lopukhina, wife of Peter I.
- so kindly wrote Evdokia Lopukhina to her young husband, waiting for the emperor from the next trip. Historians believe that at first this marriage was quite happy, but Peter quickly lost interest in his wife, even despite the heirs she gave birth to. In 1697, through intermediaries, the king tried to persuade his annoying wife to go to the monastery of her own free will, but she refused. The woman was brought to the Suzdal Intercession Monastery under escort, where she was tonsured under the name of Elena. As Peter explained later in the manifesto, -.
Content was not allocated to her, so at first Evdokia was forced to pray to her relatives:. However, later many high-ranking officials began to patronize her, and the former queen was not so badly healed behind the monastery walls. A separate house was built for her, where she lived as a laywoman and even found a new passion for her. This merry life ended again at the whim of Peter. 20 years after the tonsure, he decided to look for evidence of treason from his ex-wife in the case of his son Alexei. Finding out that the former queen does not at all atone for sins, but lives for her own pleasure, he sold out in earnest. Evdokia's lover Stepan Glebov, after long torture, was impaled; monks, nuns, hegumen and even the metropolitan, convicted of promoting fornication, were tried, beaten with whips, exiled and executed. The council of clergy also sentenced the former queen herself to beating with a whip, and she was flogged in their presence.
After the disgraced captive, from whom even a good nun did not work out, they were kept "in a strict regime" for many years - first in the Ladoga Dormition Monastery, and then in Shlisselburg. Only her grandson, Peter II, saved Evdokia from a difficult fate, who, having ascended the throne, transported her grandmother to Moscow. The practice of exiling objectionable tsarist wives to Suzdal stopped after the tsar-reformer.
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