Resurrection Novodevichy Convent

On Moskovsky Prospekt, by the Moscow Gate, stands the complex of the Resurrection Novodevichy Convent — a women's monastery with a history of more than a century and a half and one of the city's most famous necropolises. The convent's predecessor was the Smolny Convent, founded back under Elizabeth Petrovna in 1748, which existed until 1822, when it was left without a single nun.

By decree of Nicholas I the monastic community was re-established in 1845, initially housed on Vasilyevsky Island, but this location did not suit the sisters. In its place, a state-owned forest plot near the Moscow Gate was allocated to the convent, where a cemetery had already been founded four years earlier. On 15 November 1849 Metropolitan Nikanor performed the foundation ceremony for the monastery, and the emperor himself laid the first brick. Construction to the design of the architect Nikolai Yefimov and his assistants dragged on until 1854, when the nuns finally moved into the new buildings; icon-painting, gold-embroidery, and other workshops, along with kitchen gardens and orchards, were opened at the convent at the same time.

The ensemble took shape around the five-domed Resurrection Cathedral in the Russian style, with gilded onion domes on tall drums, flanked symmetrically by the Athos Church and the Church of the Three Hierarchs. Standing apart is the Kazan Church, built in 1908–1912 by the architect Vasily Kosyakov, this time in the Byzantine style, with a circular hall and a colonnade of red marble. Next to it, in 1895, rose the convent's bell tower, 55.5 metres tall, designed by Leonty Benois and Vladimir Zeidler after the model of the Ivan the Great Bell Tower in the Moscow Kremlin.

After the revolution the convent was formally abolished in 1918, but the nuns continued to live as a community around the cathedral parish. From 1928 to 1937 the abbess's quarters served as the residence of the metropolitans of Leningrad, and before the eyes of one of them, Serafim, the main cathedral and almost all the convent's churches were closed in 1929–1932, the bell tower was demolished, and around ninety nuns and novices were exiled. By the end of 1937 church life within the walls of the convent had ceased entirely.

Revival began in 1990, and in November 1995 the convent was legally restored; at that time the desecrated grave of the first abbess, Theophania, was found beneath a layer of asphalt. Restoration of the churches has stretched over decades and continues to this day. Buried in the convent's necropolis, founded in 1845, are the poets Nikolai Nekrasov and Fyodor Tyutchev, the artist Mikhail Vrubel, the physician Sergei Botkin, and the complex's own architect, Nikolai Yefimov — since 1995 the cemetery has held the status of a monument of federal significance.

The Resurrection Novodevichy Convent remains a rare example, for the city, of a monastery that has lived through a full cycle from flourishing, through Soviet destruction, to a gradual and still unfinished restoration, and its necropolis is one of the main memorial spaces of St Petersburg's cultural memory.