One of the most revered icons in Russia is the icon of the Kazan Mother of God. The holiday in honor of this icon is celebrated twice a year - on July 21 and November 4. The icon is depicted to the waist of Jesus Christ, who is facing the viewer. He blesses with one hand, he hides the other hand under a tunic. The appearance of this icon in Kazan is not accidental, it was called upon to further confirm in the faith the newly converted from the local residents, who did not believe more to dispose them to the Christian faith.
The story of the acquisition of this icon is very significant. It happened in 1579. At the end of June this year, a fire broke out in Kazan. Suddenly, the house of archer Daniil Onuchin, which was located near the church of Nikolai Tulsky, caught fire. The fire spread quickly, it spread to nearby buildings and in a short time destroyed the entire settlement and part of the Kremlin buildings. Among the most damaged buildings were the Spassky monastery and the grand ducal courtyard.
The conflagration had not yet cooled down when the Mother of God appeared in a dream to the ten-year-old girl Matrona in the family of one archer, who was burned by a terrible fire, and ordered to inform the city authorities, the archbishop and the mayor, that her surviving image was hidden in the ashes of the burnt house of the streltsy. In a dream, the Mother of God ordered the girl to take the icon from the ground, while indicating the exact location of its location. The girl told her mother about her dream, but she explained it as an ordinary childhood dream, and therefore ignored him. But a day later, the girl's dream was repeated Again, and then again. For the third time, by a miraculous force, Matrona was thrown out of the window into the courtyard, where she saw an icon, on which such formidable rays emanated from the face of the Mother of God that she was afraid to be burned by them, and a voice emanated from the icon: “If you do not fulfill My command,then I will appear in another place, and you will perish”. After that, the mother, yielding to her daughter's insistence, told the priest of her parish church about her daughter's strange night vision. The priest reported the girl's dreams to Archbishop Jeremiah. The city authorities ordered to excavate the archer's ashes.
On July 8, with a large crowd of people and in the presence of Matrona and her mother, the ashes were blown up. But the workers found nothing. But only when Matrona herself asked for a shovel and began to dig in the place where the stove stood, at a depth of two arshins she came across a cherry-colored bundle. From the bundle, which turned out to be the sleeve of the old caftan, they removed it like a new, just painted icon of the Mother of God. The icon shone with a wonderful light. It is believed that the icon was buried even before the conquest of Kazan by one of the Christians who hid their faith from the haters of the faith, the Mohammedans. It turned out that the image found by a ten-year-old girl was a list of the miraculous icon, taken from Jerusalem to Constantinople by Queen Eudokia, the wife of the Greek king Theophilos.
The news of the finding of the miraculous icon quickly spread throughout the city. Many people flocked to see this miracle. The archbishop, in the presence of the mayor, with the procession of the cross transferred the icon to the nearest church of St. Nicholas, and from there to the Cathedral of the Annunciation. The procession was accompanied by miraculous healings of the blind and sick who participated in it. These healings symbolized the fact that the icon appeared to enlighten those darkened by blindness with the spiritual light. The events in Kazan were reported to Tsar Ivan the Terrible. The icon was sent to Moscow, and a copy of it was left in Kazan, which became the main shrine of the new nunnery, built on the site of the find. The first nun and then the abbess in the monastery was the maiden Matrona, who, having matured, cut her hair and took the name of Martha.
In autumn, the holiday in honor of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God is dedicated to a slightly different event. Russia was going through difficult years at that time. With the overthrow of Tsar Vasily Ioannovich Shuisky from the throne, the royal family was interrupted in Russia. An interregnum came, accompanied by various iniquities, robberies, murders and unrest. At that time an impostor appeared in Astrakhan, who called himself Tsarevich Dimitri and won over the Cossacks and many dark and trusting people to his side. In addition, at the same time, the Poles insidiously captured Moscow and many Russian cities, and the Swedes took Novgorod. Both of them wanted to put their tsar in Russia, and already the majority of Russian people recognized the Polish prince Vladislav as their tsar. But it was hard for the faithful sons of the Fatherland on the Orthodox Russian throne to see a foreigner and a different faith as a tsar. In a time of trouble for Russia,during the Polish intervention, when the troops of the Polish king Sigismund III captured Moscow in the fall of 1610, Polish governors reigned in the Kremlin. A whole year has passed for Russia in a difficult but unsuccessful struggle against foreign invaders. And then, together, the Russian people took up arms against them and stood up to defend and liberate their capital and Fatherland. Militias from different cities and towns of the Russian land began to gather in Moscow. Liberation came in the person of a new militia led by the Nizhny Novgorod merchant Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky, which was formed in the fall of 1611. This militia tamed the revelry of the Polish interventionists and their Russian accomplices. The militia from the city of Kazan, which was drawn up by Prince Pozharsky, brought with them a copy of the miraculous icon of the Mother of God that belonged to the prince.
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The miraculous icon instilled in the Russian people self-confidence and fortitude. The warriors believed in the merciful intercession of the Mother of God. Under the patronage of the Most Holy Theotokos, the militia defeated the Poles, took away from them the Novodevichy Convent, well fortified by them, took many prisoners, and repeatedly defeated them in many clashes. But the victories were followed by disappointments. Inside the Russian troops, enmity and discord began between the heads of individual detachments, lawlessness, drunkenness, robbery and violence of the Cossacks and some warriors of the militia over the surrounding residents, instead of protecting those who were attacked and insulted by their own troops.
Thanks to the patronage of the Most Holy Theotokos, who showed Her mercy and took the faithful sons of the Fatherland under Her Protection, Russia was saved from her enemies. The militia was faced with a difficult task, accompanied by many insurmountable obstacles. First of all, it was necessary to take a well-fortified and stubbornly defended city by the Poles, to repulse the freshly numerous Polish army that had approached Moscow.
Also, the task was to pacify the willfulness and violence of the Russian troops, who met the arriving militia with almost hatred and showed them hostility and treason. …
In the arrived Militia, a decadent mood began to arise due to lack of food and lack of weapons, this led to the fact that the strength of the spirit gradually left the soldiers. As eyewitnesses of these events describe, many militias with words of forgiveness laid down their last weapons and retreated.
The last hope of the militia remained a prayer, which they turned to the Lord and His Most Pure Mother, finally losing faith in their own strength. For this they established a special solemn prayer service and strictly observed a three-day fast. The prayers were not in vain: God heard them and showed them His mercy with a miraculous sign"
At that time, the Poles seized the Kremlin and held captive the sick Archbishop of Elasson Arseny, who had arrived in Russia with the Greek Metropolitan Jeremiah. Archbishop Arseny had a significant dream in which Saint Sergius appeared to him and announced that, through the prayers of the Mother of God and the great miracle workers of Moscow Peter, Alexy, Jonah and Philip, the Lord would overthrow the enemies on the very next day and return saved Russia to her sons. As a pledge of the fulfillment of his words, Saint Sergius granted healing to Arseny.
The news of the miraculous sign quickly reached the militia troops and instilled hope in the Russian soldiers, raising their morale. The militia approached Moscow, and on October 22, 1612 Kitay-Gorod was liberated, and two days later the Kremlin. The Poles were expelled from Moscow.
Immediately the next day, Sunday, all the Russian army and residents of Moscow organized a solemn procession to the Execution Ground in gratitude for ridding themselves of their enemies. At the head of the procession carried the miraculous icon of the Mother of God, the sacred banners and other Moscow shrines. From the Kremlin, this procession was met by Archbishop Arseny with the miraculous Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God, which he kept in captivity. The image of the face of the Mother of God on the Vladimir Icon caused tears of joy on the faces of the soldiers and the people. They all knelt down and began to kiss the holy image of their Intercessor.
In honor of this significant event for Russia - the miraculous deliverance of Moscow from the Poles - at the direction of the first Russian Tsar from the Romanov family, Mikhail Fedorovich, and the blessing of his father, Metropolitan, later Patriarch, Filaret, October 22 was established by the Church as a feast of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God. The young tsar, striving to consecrate his newly begun dynasty, to establish in the minds of the people his God-chosenness, declared the icon of Our Lady of Kazan to be the shrine of the Romanov family.
Since then, a procession of the cross has been held annually on this day. First, it was performed in the Church of the Presentation of the Mother of God, which is located on the Lubyanka, since there was the house of Prince Pozharsky. And after Prince Pozharsky at his own expense built a new temple in honor of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God (now it is the Kazan Cathedral on Red Square), the procession began to take place in the cathedral. And it was here that the icon itself was subsequently transferred.
During the reign of Peter I, the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God was transferred to the new capital - Petersburg. Here until 1811 she was in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. And then it was moved to the newly built Kazan Cathedral. In total, there were three equally revered miraculous icons of the Kazan Mother of God in Russia. The first icon was in Kazan in the Bogoroditsky monastery, the second icon of Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich, which was transported by Peter I to Petersburg, and, finally, the third was in the Moscow Kazan Cathedral, and it was given by Prince Pozharsky.