Transfiguration Monastery

The Transfiguration Monastery occupies the south-western corner of the Kazan Kremlin and today survives only as ruins and partially reconstructed buildings — once one of the leading Orthodox monasteries of the region, second in importance within the Kazan diocese only to the Dormition Monastery of Sviyazhsk. Its territory is very small, less than a hectare, squeezed between sections of the wall running from the Savior Tower to the Transfiguration Tower.

The monastery was founded in 1556 under the leadership of Archimandrite Varsonofy, a man who in his youth had spent several years in Crimean captivity and, as a result, spoke fluent Tatar — a skill that determined his appointment to the recently conquered Kazan. Monks from the Nikolo-Peshnoshsky Monastery near Moscow arrived with him. At first there stood here two wooden churches on stone undercrofts; already in the 1560s one of them, the Church of St Nicholas of the Warriors, was rebuilt in stone — in the same years as the adjoining lower tier of the Savior Tower, using the same Volga limestone. Kazan’s first archbishop, Gury, took monastic vows here before his death and in 1563 was buried behind the altar of the Transfiguration Cathedral, founding the monastery necropolis, where, over the following four centuries, priests, theological academy professors, merchants and military men found their final resting place.

After the fire of 1579, which destroyed the wooden church, a stone five-domed church on six piers rose from the ashes — a large cathedral, comparable in scale to the Kremlin’s own Annunciation Cathedral. It was built on the surviving undercroft of the burned structure, which has survived to this day. To the east, the monastery grounds were bounded by a brick wall running to the Church of Cyprian and Justina, which was later attached to the monastery.

The monastery’s fate changed abruptly after 1917. In the autumn of 1918, the Kremlin was declared a military garrison and closed to civilians, and all its churches were sealed; the nuns of the neighbouring Theotokos Convent managed to remove the reliquaries containing the relics of Saints Gury and Varsonofy in time. Later a military unit was stationed on the grounds, the necropolis gravestones were destroyed, and the monastery cathedral and the Church of Cyprian and Justina were blown up. The very fate of the relics of the monastery’s founder, Varsonofy, after their confiscation is lost somewhere in the holdings of the city’s museums.

Excavations in 1995 recovered the relics of Jonah, Nektary and Metropolitan Ephrem. Today the surviving ensemble includes the brethren’s building, the plinth of the demolished cathedral with its surviving vaulted undercroft and a “little cave” behind the altar, the reconstructed Church of St Nicholas of the Warriors, and fragments of the enclosure wall. The territory is part of the Kazan Kremlin Museum-Reserve, the restored brethren’s building is used for the museum’s needs, and a small portion of the relocated burials now rest in a chapel at the Arskoye Cemetery, consecrated in 2006.

The Transfiguration Monastery remains a monument with a dual legacy: a place where Orthodox Kazan was born in the 16th century, and at the same time a testament to how the Kremlin’s shrines irrevocably vanished during the Soviet decades — its ruins and surviving fragments today tell both chapters of its history.