Moscow Church

Wed Oct 27 05:56:50 UTC 2010

Dear Mikhail Gronas,

Thanks for these images, many of which elicit nostalgia.  A good historical reference to the church there is:

Svetozarskii, Aleksei Konstantinovich.  1998.  Moskovskii khram SVIATITELIA NIKOLAIA CHUDOTVORTSA v Khamovnikakh i chudotvornaia ikona Bozhiei Materi “SPORUCHNITSA GRESHNYKH”, v nem prebyvaiushchaia.  Moscow: Otchii dom.

For those who are interested, here are condensed remarks (from my book THE JOY OF ALL WHO SORROW, Moscow, 2005) about the famous miracle-working ikon in the Khamovniki church:

The first miracles attributed to this icon took place in the Nikolaev Odrin Monastery in Karachev, Orlov province, during the 1840s, after some inhabitants of the area had dreams[i] affirming the miraculous power of this previously obscure and forgotten icon.  For example, a widow by the name of Aleksandra Pochepina approached the monks of the monastery and asked them to pray before the icon on behalf of her son, who suffered sometimes as many as five seizures per day.  The brothers performed the service, and afterwards they received word that the boy was completely cured of his seizures.  In similar fashion another boy was cured of convulsions, and a little girl recovered her vision after having been blinded by scrofula.  A copy of the icon painted in Moscow supposedly cured a woman of osteoarticular tuberculosis (“stradala ot kostnogo tuberkuleza”) after she spent a night chanting the akathist of the Pokrov Mother of God before the icon.  Two young Muscovite women were!
  cured of cholera after swallowing some oil from the icon’s lamp as well as applying the oil to their skin.  A hysterical woman (“klikusha”) was cured of her convulsive fits after some of the oil was applied to her abdomen.  Drops of myrrh formed on the surface of this copy of the icon both before and after it was moved from a private residence into the Church of Saint Nicholas the Miracle-worker in the Khamovniki section of Moscow in 1848.  For some time after the move mysterious lights were seen flickering in the vicinity of the icon at night, and this phenomenon was regarded as miraculous.  Meantime, quite a large collective of venerators had formed around this miracle-working icon.  Many claimed that they survived the cholera epidemic of 1848 through the intercession of the Khamovniki icon.  An 1855 manuscript written by a local priest enumerates 116 miracles attributed to this icon (or copies of it) after it was moved to the Khamovniki church.  Still other miracu!
 lous cures were attributed to copies of the Khamovniki variant which a
rrived in parts of Siberia later in the nineteenth century.[ii]  As for the Khamovniki icon itself, it continued to work miracles well into the twentieth century: a church priest was cured of typhus in 1918, his family was saved from starvation in 1919, his home was saved from a fire in 1939, and so on.[iii]

[i] .  The connection of dreams with icons is an interesting phenomenon worthy of psychological study.  Many an icon has been “found” after someone has a dream of where it is located, or has been painted on the basis of a dream, or has appeared to a patient in therapy, etc.

[ii].  See Svetozarskii 1998, 62-63, 77, 79-86, 190-215; Snessoreva 1999 (1898), 115-118.

[iii].  Svetozarskii 1999, 111-13.

With regards to the list,
Daniel R-L

http://Rancour-Laferriere.com

On Oct 25, 2010, at 10:29 PM, Mikhail Gronas wrote:

It's Nikola v Khamovnikakh:

http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=никола+в+хамовниках&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&biw=1235&bih=668

http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Храм_Николая_Чудотворца_в_Хамовниках

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