Simonov Monastery (1370)

Ancient Simonov Monastery was founded in the seventies by a fourteenth-century nephew and at the same time a disciple of St. Sergius of Radonezh, the Monk Feodor. It was he who later became famous as a personal spiritual mentor of Prince Donskoy.

Simonov Monastery received its name from the boyar Stefan Khovrin, who became a monk Simon and donated land for the construction of a complex ten versts south of Moscow.

Originally, this monastery was a little lower down the Moscow River leading to Moscow, but Fyodor, trying to find even more privacy, chose for the monastery quite a different place, next to the old one. And in 1380 Simonov Monastery was moved to the place where it stands today. In place of the old one there remained only a small parish church of the Nativity, under the bell tower of which in the second half of the eighteenth century the graves of Peresvet and Oslyaba, the heroes of the Kulikovo battle, were discovered.

Simonovsky Monastery was well-known in Russia: large deposits always flowed here. He was especially fond of visiting Tsar Feodor Alekseevich, for whom the cells were specially arranged so that the king could pray in Lent. His most famous monks - Cyril and Ferapont - students of St. Radonezhsky, later moved to the monastery of Alexander Svirsky.

In 1771, during the reign of Catherine II, Simonov Monastery was closed, turning on the occasion of a plague spreading with a terrible force into the plague quarantine, but in 1795, thanks to the petition of the Russian statesman Musin-Pushkin, this holy monastery was restored.

According to the chroniclers, this monastery has repeatedly become the "shield" of Moscow, which protects it from enemies. Over the years of its existence, it has repeatedly assumed the onslaught of enemies, was subjected to raids by the Tatars, and in the Time of Troubles it was utterly ruined and almost destroyed to the ground.

In the 1920s, after the Bolsheviks came to power, Simonov monastery suffered the fate of most Russian churches: it was completely abolished. Since 1923, in its building was built a museum, which existed only until 1930. The director of the museum was a very intelligent and practical man who established relations with the local church community, allowing her to conduct services in one of the churches in exchange for providing the museum with a watchman and a janitor from the community. In January of the same year, the state commission nevertheless recognized that part of the monastic ancient buildings should be preserved as historical monuments, but the cathedral and some walls were still decided to be demolished.

The blast that thundered on the night of January 21, on the sixth anniversary of the leader, five of the six churches, the Assumption Cathedral with the bell tower, the gate churches, as well as the towers Storozhevoy and Tainitsky, with all the buildings adjoining them, took off. During the working days of subbotniks, almost all the walls of the Simonov Monastery were dismantled, all the graves that were on the territory of the monastery were destroyed, and in 1937 the Palace of Culture was erected in ruins left from the "fortress of the obscurantism of the church", as written in the pages of the magazine Ogonyok.

The monastery was returned to the church only in 1990, when it was actively restored.

Only a small part of it has reached us. From the monastery, its southern wall with towers could survive: the corner "Dulo", the pentahedral "Blacksmith" and the round "Salt", the refectory and the church of the Holy Spirit were also preserved.