Translated material
In the Moscow Marfo-Mariinsky monastery will be held a feast of mercy
In the Moscow Marfo-Mariinsky monastery, on Thursday, a festival of mercy will be held, dedicated to the 95th anniversary of the martyrdom of its founder- Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fedorovna Romanova . At the holiday, everyone will teach everyone to provide first aid.
"In the garden of the monastery of the graduate of the Holy Dmitriyevsky school, sisters of mercy will teach everyone to provide first aid. Sisters of mercy will conduct master classes on layouts, show how to stop bleeding, explain how to help if a person has a heart attack. The guests will have the opportunity to try their hand and practice on special mannequins," said RIA Novosti " Press Secretary of the Orthodox Assistance Service "Mercy" Anna Ovsyannikova.
The holiday in the monastery, she noted, will precede the worship, which will be headed by the chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for church charity, Bishop of Orekhovo-Zuevsky Panteleimon.
On the stage, next to the Pokrovsky church of the monastery, a concert with the participation of artists of the opera center Galina Vishnevskaya and Children's Choreographic Studio "Century" will be held. All day excursions will be held on the temple and house-museum of the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, where household items, letters, photographs of the Grand Duchess are collected. For young visitors to the monastery, thematic games and commemorative prizes have been prepared. And all guests of the holiday are waiting for a free treat and tea party.
In the Marfo-Mariinsky monastery of mercy, closed after the revolution and restored in the 21st century, 25 sisters live today. They visit lonely old people and disabled people. On the territory of the monastery, the projects of the Service Service are being implemented related to the rehabilitation of children with disabilities and the support of people with severe genetic diseases. The need for those in need is also organized here - people come to the monastery for products, medicines and help in solving complex everyday issues. In the Elizabethan orphanage, more than 20 girls are brought up at the monastery.
On the founder of the Marfo-Mariinsky monastery
The founder of the Marfo-Mariinsky monastery Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fedorovna (1864-1918) was the sister of Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, the daughter of the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt Ludwig IV from the Prussian dynasty of the Hohenzollern, the granddaughter of the British Queen of Victoria and a relative of the Catholic Saints of the 13th century Elizabeth of the Türingenskaya, one of the ancestors of the Hesse and Saxon house.
At the age of 19, she married Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich Romanov, Governor-General of Moscow, and accepted Orthodoxy. Today, the Martyr Elizavet Fedorovna can be called one of the most revered saints of the Russian Orthodox Church, her icons appeared in many temples in Russia and abroad. Even during his lifetime, Elizabeth Fedorovna was among the people "great mother." She took care of military infirmaries, orphans, female gymnasium, the blind society and many other charitable organizations, together with the Grand Duke, took care of the Imperial Orthodox Palestinian society.
After the murder of her husband, terrorist Kalyaev, whom Elizaveta Fedorovna managed to forgive, she founded in Zamoskvorechye, on Bolshaya Ordynka Street, a unique Marfo-Mariinsky monastery of mercy. The monastery began its activities in 1909. Elizaveta Fedorovna became her first abbess and, together with the sisters, looked after the sick and wounded during the First World War.
After the revolution, the princess refused to leave Russia and was arrested in the spring of 1918. The day after the execution of the royal family, on July 18, 1918, Elizaveta Fedorovna, together with the faithful associate of the monk Barbara and other martyrs, was dropped alive in the Lower Selim mine near Alapaevsky in the Sverdlovsk region.
The remains of Elizabeth Fedorovna by January 1921 were transported to Jerusalem and buried in Gepsimania in a crypt under the church of St. Mary Magdalene, owned by the Russian foreign church. The Russian foreign church ranked Elizabeth Fedorovna to the face of saints in 1981, the Church in the Fatherland in 1992.
To create the first monastery of mercy in Russia, Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fedorovna acquired a manor with four houses and an extensive garden on Bolshaya Ordynka and herself developed a charter that differed from the monastery. The main task of the monastery’s sisters was to help the poor and sick, visiting their dwellings and sharing their sorrows.
At the opening of the sisters, there were only six, in a year their number increased to 30, and by 1914 - almost 100. Widows and girls of the Orthodox religion were accepted, who wanted to devote their lives to the service of God and neighbors, not younger than 21 years old, but not older than 40 years old, because the work required a lot of effort. All sisters underwent a first aid course, and those who specialized in medicine studied with experienced doctors. Among the "obedience" in the monastery were also as follows: church, prosphore, pharmacy, needlework, school, administrative-economic.
The monastery itself housed a hospital for 22 beds, in which doctors were constantly on duty and did free operations, and an outpatient clinic for the poor, in which they also took patients, issued free medicines, and medical procedures were carried out. In 1913, almost 11 thousand visits were registered in the outpatient clinic.
On the territory of the monastery there were a pharmacy where medicines were released poor for free, a shelter for 18 girls, a Sunday school for illiterate and illiterate women working in factories, a library, which totaled more than 2 thousand volumes, a free dining room, daily released over 300 lunch at the house for poor large mothers.
In 1926, the Marfo-Mariinsky monastery of mercy was closed. Since September 1944, in the main Pokrovsky Cathedral of the monastery, built according to the project of the famous architect Alexei Schusev, painted by the famous artists Mikhail Nesterov and Pavel Korin, a workshop of the Igor Grabar restoration center is located.
The revival of the monastery began in 1992, when the decree of the capital's government was transferred to the Moscow Patriarchate. However, it began to actively restore it since 2006, the keys to the Pokrovsky Cathedral were transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church by the Restoration Center named after Grabar only at the end of 2006.