Andreevsky Monastery

In the area historically known as Plennitsy, at the foot of the Sparrow Hills on the bank of the Moskva River, stands the Andreevsky Monastery — a stauropegic monastery for men of the Russian Orthodox Church. The ensemble is protected as an architectural and urban-planning landmark of federal significance. Today it houses the Synodal Library and the Patriarchate's information department, and the monastery itself stands between the Donskoy and Novodevichy monasteries.

Tradition traces the monastery’s origins to the 13th century, but it is documented only from the mid-17th century onward. Its modern history is linked to the initiative of the boyar Fyodor Rtishchev, who, at the request of the Kyiv metropolitan Peter Mogila, decided to open a school here for teaching Greek and Slavonic literacy. In 1646–1647 thirty monks arrived from monasteries in Little Russia, soon followed by the learned scholars Epiphanius Slavinetsky and Arseny Satanovsky; the “Teaching Brotherhood” they formed became the first school of its kind in Moscow devoted to books and learning. The monastery received the name Andreevsky in 1652, thanks to verses by Epiphanius Slavinetsky dedicated to the Apostle Andrew the First-Called.

The initial complex of monastery buildings was erected in 1648–1654 under the direction of the architect Grigory Kopyl; the Church of the Resurrection was consecrated at that time and later rebuilt in 1689–1703. In 1675, the gate church of Andrew Stratelates was built above the Holy Gates, its facades decorated with colored “peacock's eye” tiles made by Belarusian craftsmen. The bell tower with the Church of St. John the Theologian was built in 1748 with funds from Count Sheremetev. The grounds form a regular rectangle framed by 19th-century buildings.

After the school's heyday, the brotherhood was transferred in 1682 to the Zaikonospassky Monastery, where the Slavic Greek Latin Academy later arose. In 1724, by decree of Peter I, the monks were sent to the Donskoy Monastery, and the buildings were used first as an orphanage for foundlings, then as a prison and an almshouse for the insane. During the plague epidemic of 1771, a cemetery for noble Moscow families was established here, later destroyed during the Soviet decades. In 1806, a home for the elderly, founded by the Moscow merchantry for nearly six hundred people, was set up in the former monastery, and after the revolution workers of the Goznak factory settled in the cells; the last services here ceased by the late 1930s.

Revival began in 1991, when a patriarchal metochion was opened here and the Synodal Library was transferred here from the Danilov Monastery. In 1996 the complex was finally handed over to the Church, and in 2013 the metochion was converted into a functioning monastery. Today the monastery has a bookshop and an icon shop, as well as a Sunday school, and during the summer navigation season pleasure boats dock at the riverbank nearby.

The history of the Andreevsky Monastery exemplifies a monastery that became not only a spiritual but also an educational center: the “Teaching Brotherhood” was the forerunner of the Slavic Greek Latin Academy, Russia’s first institution of higher learning, and the surviving ensemble remains a monument of pre-Petrine architecture.