P?htitsa monastery house in St. Petersburg: 120 years of history
Abstract
The article is devoted to the phenomenon of the capital’s monastic houses at the beginning of the 20th century using the example of the construction of a house of P?htitsa Assumption Convent of Riga Diocese (now a stauropegic monastery in Estonia). The case was faced with numerous, typical in such cases, diffi culties: the choice of location, which has changed several times; lack of funds for construction, which was usually covered by private donations; the cautious attitude of the metropolitan hierarchy towards the arrangement of offi ces diff erent from those of St. Petersburg. The originally considered plot in Peterhof was donated to the monastery by the well-off peasant family of the Gvozdevs, whose representative was the famous Athonite schema-monk Parthenius. The decisive role in the arrangement of the house on another site in St. Petersburg together with Tikhvin church (made of stone, 1903– 1906) was played by the Baltic Orthodox Brotherhood of Christ the Saviour and of the Protection of Theotokos under the chairmanship of M. Galkin-Vraskoy and the merchant benefactor K. Ivanova, as well as St. John of Kronstadt and Archbishop Agafangel (Preobrazhensky).The author of the project of the church in Moscow- Yaroslavl version of the Russian style, civil engineer V. Bobrov, himself rebuilt it in 1929 as a department store. The rebuilt building still exists today. Despite the short period of its existence, P?htitsa house was a centre of spiritual life of the Harbour, the area actively built up at the beginning of the 20th century, and the construction dominant element of the capital’s suburbs. P?htitsa novice Anna Markina established another women’s house, of Tvozhkovsky Trinity Monastery in the 1910s that was built on her own land in St. Petersburg (now completely lost).
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