KAZAN MOTHER OF GOD—WHERE HAS THE MOST POPULAR ICON IN RUSSIA DISAPPEARED TO?
by Anton Skripunov
The Day of National Unity is a relatively recent holiday. However it is based on events that have not only historical but also religious meaning. On this day [4 November] Orthodox believers recall how thanks to the icon of the Kazan Mother of God, the people's militia managed to liberate Moscow [1611].
But today this holiday will have to be celebrated without its principal symbol—the icon itself. And nobody knows how it disappeared and where it is now. This RIA Novosti article is about the mysterious appearance and the very mysterious disappearance of this chief Russian sacred item.
According to church
tradition, the icon appeared in ashes.
After a terrible fire in Kazan in 1579, the Mother of God appeared
to a local
resident, Matrona, and showed her where to find the icon wrapped
in a cloth.
And when it was found, rumors about numerous miracles found their
way to Tsar
Ivan the Terrible himself and a copy of the image was sent to him.
However, how this image actually appeared is unknown to the present day. According to one version, it was brought to Muslim Kazan by Orthodox missionaries; according to another, the icon was painted by one of the local residents.
In 1611, the Kazan icon became the banner of the troops of Dmitry Pozharsky. According to legend, before the assault on Moscow, which had been captured by Poles, the prince ordered the troops to hold a three-day fast and to pray continually before the miracle-working icon. And when the capital of the Russian state was liberated, citizens and all the troops conducted a procession of the cross with the icon to the Execution Site [Lobnoe Mesto on Red Square], thanking the Mother of God for helping the country and its people.
Twenty years later, veneration of the icon became nationwide. It was chosen to be the "protector" of Russian troops during the Smolensk war with the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Throughout the country there appeared numerous copies of the icon of the Kazan Mother of God. Closer to the 18th century this image became truly nationwide, symbolizing not only the intercession of the Theotokos for the country but also the unity of the people. By the 19th century, Kazan became a center of pilgrimage; Christians came from all the world to venerate the miracle-working image.
But it was the nationwide popularity of the sacred item that played an evil trick on it. The enormous number of copies often led to confusion and many believers did not understand just where the original was preserved. Clergymen even published brochures with evidence that the image was located in the Kazan convent of the Mother of God, built on the site where the sacred item was discovered.
It was this cloister that a certain Varfolomei Chaikin liked to visit. He spent a great deal of time especially near the icon on 25, 26, and 27 June 1904. These days the icon of the Smolensk Mother of God icon was brought to Kazan. Both sacred items were exhibited in the center of the church and long services were conducted in their honor in the convent, after which the exhausted nuns immediately fell asleep. Two days later, all of Kazan felt a shock.
"Crowds of people surrounded the convent from early morning on 29 June and, so long as it was possible, they filled the church, porch, and even the yard of the convent. Genuine horror and grief were expressed on the faces of everyone who appeared in the cloister to share the general inexpressible sorrow. Sad tears flowed both on those who told and on those who listened to the details of this sad event in the life of the convent and Orthodox Kazan. Everyone felt the dear loss of the convent as a personal loss. Nobody believed that the kidnapping would not be cleared up," one eyewitness wrote.
News about the theft flew quickly throughout the country. Many saw in this a bad sign when literally on the next day after the kidnapping a long-awaited heir was born to the emperor. The best detectives were engaged in investigating the crime and Nicholas II personally oversaw the investigation.
The testimony of nine-year-old Evgenia Kucherova became crucial in the affair. Late in the evening of 28 June she saw Anany Komov and Stoyan Chaikin (the name Varfolomei was not genuine—in criminal circles he was considered a first-class thief) approaching the church. This helped the police to go to the criminals. But what happened next, nobody has been able to explain to the present. Several versions exist.
The icon was destroyed: Kucherova maintained that she saw Komov and Chaikin break up the icon with an axe and throw it into the stove. Chaikin constantly changed his story. First he said that he really did destroy the icon; then he stated that he gave it to Old Believers since they gave a great deal of money for the old Russian image. This version was considered the main one by the investigation.
"The fate of the original is unknown. The church thinks that the image disappeared after the theft," notes the vice-chairman of the Academic Committee of the Russian Orthodox Church, Archpriest Maksim Kozlov.
The icon was not stolen: Such rumors appeared immediately after the tragedy as soon as a copy of the icon was exhibited in the Mother of God convent. There is a version that every evening before closing the church, the abbess put the original in a hiding place and set a copy in its place. Be that as it may, the image that was exhibited after 1904 was also stolen, either in 1917 or a year later, in 1918. What happened to it next, no one knows.
"The first image disappeared without a trace after the revolution of 1917," supposes Archpriest Alexander Ageikin, the rector of the Epiphany cathedral church in Elokhov (Moscow).
In the 1990s there appeared a myth to the effect that the icon was hidden by secret police. According to legend, during the war, on Stalin's personal initiative, it supposedly was flown to the front.
The icon was held in a personal collection of by Catholics: In 1960 the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia learned about a certain English collector who had the "ancient icon of the Kazan Mother of God that is very much like the original." A version arose that the icon had been saved by associates of General Wrangel and later turned up in the U.S.A., but it had to be sold to the local Orthodox community.
Yet another version says that Portuguese Catholics bought the icon from that English collector and brought it to Fatima. In 1917 the Theotokos also appeared miraculously to children. Actually in Fatima there is the metallic covering of an Orthodox icon, which some scholars declare to have belonged to the original image.
According to yet another version, the icon was given to Roman Pope John Paul II, who kept it in his personal quarters for eleven years. In 2004, the "Vatican" image was delivered to the Russian Orthodox Church. It is now kept in the Kazan Mother of God convent.
"The image delivered by the Catholics really is a copy," religious scholar Aleksei Yudin explains.
There now are in Russia several copies besides the "Vatican" copy that are considered to be miracle-working. The most famous are located in the Kazan cathedrals of Moscow and St. Petersburg. But judging from descriptions composed in the 19th century, they measure a bit larger than the original. In 2011, a copy of the Kazan icon was taken to the International Space Station.
Dozens of churches and monasteries in honor of
this image
have been scattered throughout the country. In practically every
region there
are their own locally venerated icons of the Kazan Mother of God.
Paradoxically, the mysterious disappearance of icon that had been
discovered
has only intensified its veneration among believers. (tr. by PDS,
posted 10 November
2017)
Background article:
Kazan
icon's trip home completed, controversy continues
August 28, 2004
Vatican's
icon may not be genuine
January 1, 2001
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