St. John the Forerunner Monastery

The St. John the Forerunner Monastery stands opposite the Spasskaya Tower of the Kazan Kremlin, across the square that before the revolution was called Ivanovskaya precisely after this monastery. Once the tower’s tent roof and the monastery’s triple-tented cathedral formed a single paired silhouette, recognizable from afar and defining the approach to the Kremlin; today only the pillarless Presentation (Vvedenskaya) Church and the bell tower survive from the ancient ensemble, but the monastery remains active and is known for its charitable work.

The monastery was founded around 1567 by Saint Herman of Kazan, who shortly before had headed the Dormition Monastery in Sviyazhsk: at first a metochion (dependency) of the Sviyazhsk monastery appeared here, already mentioned in the land survey register of 1565. It received official status as an independent monastery in 1594 by decree of Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich, following a petition to the sovereign by the Metropolitan of Kazan, Hermogenes, the future patriarch and hieromartyr.

The first buildings were made of wood and burned down in the fire of 1649. The monastery was rebuilt, this time in stone, in 1649–1652 with funds from the wealthy Moscow merchant Gavriil Fyodorov-Antipin: over three years a triple-tented unheated cathedral with two side chapels was erected, along with the five-domed Presentation Church with carved window frames and an octagonal bell tower with tiers of kokoshniks. The cathedral, with its triple-tented form rare for the area — echoing the famous “Wondrous” (Divnaya) church in Uglich — was consecrated on September 7, 1652.

In 1815 another fire forced residents to raise 53,000 rubles for the monastery’s restoration, and Emperor Alexander I personally donated another five thousand. By the end of the century the 17th-century cathedral had nonetheless fallen into complete disrepair; despite protests from Kazan architects and professors, Archbishop Palladius had it dismantled and, in 1887–1894, built in its place a copy almost twice the size — funded mainly by private donations from merchants and townspeople. The monastery is also known for its spiritual history: it was here that the future Optina elder Varsonofy, then still an officer of the Kazan Military District, began his path to monasticism.

After the revolution the monastery went through its hardest decades: in 1918, when the Kremlin was closed off as a military garrison, the Kazan diocesan administration moved here, and several of the monks were arrested and exiled in the 1920s. In 1930 the authorities decided to dismantle the monastery wall and the triple-tented cathedral for building material to repair the Kremlin walls, and in 1936 the Presentation Church was closed and handed over as a workshop for homeless children.

The monastery was returned to the Kazan diocese in 1992 — the second to be revived after the Raifa Monastery. During the construction of the metro, a pit was dug next to the monastery, which caused cracks to appear in the walls of the 17th-century Presentation church; these were only partially repaired. Services resumed in the restored church in 1994, and the monastery has become known for its charity — it is the only place in the city where the poor are fed for free every day. The bell tower and the monks’ and abbot’s residential buildings, together with the Presentation Church, are today protected as architectural monuments.