Tupichevsky Svyatoduhovskiy monastery

It was founded in 1641 in the tract Tupichevshchina - now the eastern outskirts of the Belarusian city of Mstislavl . According to legend, here, from nowhere, the icon of the Mother of God appeared to the inhabitants. Kravchy of the Mstislavl Voivodeship Kazimir Moskiewicz, who owned these places, built a church in the name of the Descent of the Holy Spirit and placed an icon there. He wanted to establish a monastery and even wrote down 2 plots of land for him, but he died, asking his wife and sons to realize his plan. They turned to the residents of Mstislav, to the abbot of the Orsha Epiphany Kuteinsky monastery, Ioily Trutsevich, and to their relatives, the landowners Stetkevichs. With the funds raised, a monastery was built in 1641, which included wooden churches - Svyatoduhovskaya, Svyatovedenskaya and Svyatonikolaevskaya ^[1] .

The monastery was subordinate to the abbot Joel Trutsevich, who was under the obedience of the Patriarch of Constantinople ^[2] .

In October 1645, the Church of the Holy Spirit was consecrated as a cathedral by the bishop of Mstislavl, Orsha and Mogilev Sylvester Kossov ^[3]

The Tupichevschina tract rises above the surrounding lands, cut off from the city by two ravines of the ice age, at the foot - the wide river Vikhra. It was of great importance: times were turbulent. From the side of the city, the monks erected a brick wall of a meter thick.

After Trutsevich’s departure to Russia, the Mstislavl Bohdan Wilhelmovich Stetkevich , who founded the Epiphany (1623) and Assumption (1631) Kutein monasteries, as well as Buynic (1633) and Barkolobovsky (1641), was appointed guardian of the monastery. Stetkevich wrote to the monastery a house with a garden ^[4] .

In the first half of the 17th century, monks came from nearby Onufrievsky and Pustynsky monasteries - after the transition of these monasteries to the Uniate Church .

On September 5, 1708, Peter I attended a service at the monastery, praying before the battle with the Swedes on the Chernaya Natopa River . The Russian troops won in this battle, and Peter pleased the monastery left a security certificate and 300 rubles ^[5] .

In 1718 there were 14 inhabitants in the monastery. Since 1842, the monastery was considered ascribed to the Mstislavsky city Nikolsky (until 1877), Belshevik (until 1886) and the Mazolovsky monasteries ^[6] .

After 1873 the monastery fell into decay, its property and library were transferred to the Belynichi Christmas Monastery , and the monks were transferred in 1877 to the former Belynichi Carmelite Monastery.

The revival of the monastery took place in 1887 - it became female; in 1895, the stone Holy Assumption Cathedral was built, where the miraculous icon of the Mother of God “Tupichevskaya” was identified, to which hundreds of pilgrims flocked. A monastery house with two halves was set up on a nearby farm: one for the priest, the other for the parish school. The monastery owned land, two mills. Since 1903, a parish school, a medical dispensary and a pharmacy have been working at the monastery, providing free assistance to the surrounding residents. The guardians of the pharmacy and the outpatient clinic were Bishop Stefan of Mogilev and Mstislavsky and Mother Superior Anatoly (Anna Chernyavskaya).

The monastery was closed in 1918 . In the 1930s, part of the buildings were destroyed; in the remaining ones before the war there was an orphanage. Everything finally burned out during the Great Patriotic War. Only the gates of the 19th century remained. An oil and cheese factory was built on the foundation of the monastery in 1959 .

Of the abbess of the monastery, Viktor (Sadkovsky) , the future archbishop of Chernigov, is known in 1774 ^[7] . Also, the sources mention Kirill Kozlovsky, later rector of the Jekabpils monastery in Latvia.

The monastery was written in the novel of the Belarusian writer Oleg Zhdan, “Sovereign and Bishop” ^[8] .

The monastery is mentioned in Belarusian local history and works on the history of Belarusian architecture - in the books of I. Pyatnitsky, V. Krasnyansky, V. Korotkevich , O. Trusov , M. Tkachev , I. Slyunkova .

Bogdan Stetkevich built the Church of the Holy Spirit in the style of the Orthodox churches he had previously founded - it was a five-domed cross-shaped centric wooden cathedral measuring 24.1 × 23.4 m on a stone foundation. The temple was surrounded by a covered roundabout gallery. A dome with a head rested on a high octagonal drum with windows. At the temple there were canopies and a basement . In the years 1877-1880. the church was rebuilt, embossed, painted, removed the canopy. The main throne of the temple is the Descent of the Holy Spirit, the side - in the name of the great martyr George. In 1895, a stone cathedral church in the Neo-Byzantine style was built on the site of a wooden temple ^[9] .

A warm wooden Church on the stone foundation of the Introduction to the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary was built. Size 12.1 × 6.4 m. Cells adjoined the church. Later the church was thoroughly rebuilt.

In 1771, in the upper tier of the bell tower was built a wooden church of St. Nicholas.

V. G. Krasnyansky, who was in the church, writes that he saw many “ancient icons and sacred objects, donations to the monastery by patriarchs and kings ... But the wall painting is a particularly outstanding landmark of the church; the walls are upholstered with canvas, and the events of the Old Testament and New Testament history are depicted on the canvas with paints. The painting is of high quality, but breathes a naive, deep religious feeling. " Krasnyansky counted over 70 compositions on biblical motifs and apocryphal plots on the walls. In the drum of the dome stretched the panorama of “The Seven Angels of Angels”, beneath them are the holy fools, below are the faces of the apostles, martyrs and prophets, even lower are the faces of the kings and queens, then the faces of the reverend fathers and nuns; then, in the lower tier - the faces of the evangelists, framed by cartouches (garlands and fruits). The scenes of the life of Jesus Christ were painted on the altar and the southern wall of the church, on the northern wall - the life of the Virgin, the subjects of Holy Week - on the western wall. In the narthex are paintings of the torment of early Christian saints. The iconography of the temple clearly goes back to Western European models, it shows the baroque features ^{[10] [11]} .

In addition to the murals and the library with “ancient manuscripts,” Krasnyansky notes the five-tiered five-tier carved gilded iconostasis . When the monastery was abolished in 1839, the iconostasis was dismantled and transferred to the church of the Pustyn Assumption Monastery near Mstislavl.

The icon appeared in the tract Tupichevshchina near Mstislavl, in this place in 1641 the Holy Spirit Monastery was founded. The icon was considered miraculous, pilgrims from the Mogilev and Smolensk regions flocked to it. The icon was celebrated on the day of the Assumption of the Mother of God on August 28 (15th style). She was one of the icons before which they prayed for protection from captivity and foreigners.

The icon is associated with the restoration of the procession of the procession . This question was brought up for discussion by the Holy Synod ; he issued a definition approved by Nicholas I in September 1847. Since that time, religious processions were held in Mstislavl - on May 8 (on the eve of the day of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker) - to the Mogilev Nikolsky Monastery , on the day of the celebration of Easter - from the Nikolsky Monastery to Mazolovsky, on the 9th Thursday after Easter (the day of the Catholic holiday of the Body of God; day reunification of Belarusian Uniates with Orthodoxy) - from the Mozolovsky monastery to Tupichevsky, on August 15 - the appearance of the icon is celebrated. The miraculous icon was placed in the lower tier of the predaltar carved five-tier iconostasis, to the left of the royal gates ^[12] .

In 1711, through the efforts of the Father Superior of the Monastery of Mikhail Puzyn, the image of the icon was engraved ^[13] .

The icon is lost, now its list is in the St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral of Mstislavl. A sisterhood was created at the cathedral in honor of the Tupichev Icon of the Mother of God.

The Tupichev Icon has another name - "Semigorodnaya". This was a cause for error: sometimes instead of the Tupichev icon they give an image of the icon “The Assumption of the Seven-city”. In addition, the days of the celebration of the icons coincide ^[14] .

Father Superior Barnabas (Uronovich) 1671

Father Superior Jerome (Shkovsky) 1687.

Hegumen Gabriel 1697

Mother Superior Michael (Puzyna) 1715.

Hegumen Jacob (Ilinitsky) 1716-1728.

Hegumen Anthony (Tomilo) 1729-1734gg.

Hegumen Innokenty (Ludogossky) 1738-1759gg.

Hegumen Jacob Ilinitsky 1760

Hegumen Joseph (Blazhevsky) 1760-1772gg.

Hegumen Victor (Sadkovsky) 1774

Hegumen David (Lyatoshinsky) 1786.

Hegumen Plato (Kalinovsky) 1787-1793gg.

Mother Superior Michael (Raevsky) 1794

Hegumen Gerontiy (Ludogovsky) 1795-1812gg.

Mother Superior Michael (Raevsky) 1812-1822

Hegumen Feoktist 1824 - March 1831.

Archimandrite Ioannikiy (Zenkevich) March 1831 - December 1874

Archimandrite Polievkt (Pyaskovsky) 12/12/1874 - 2.3.1877.

Archimandrite Daniil (Rostov) 11/29/1880 - 1891

• Tupichevsky Holy Spirit Monastery // Church Gazette. - M. , 1890. - No. 37 .
• Korotkevich V.S. Mstislavl. An essay about history and about people of the same land. - Mn. : Belarus, 1985 .-- 142 p.
• Slyunkova I.N. Monasteries of Eastern and Western Traditions: Heritage of Belarusian Architecture . - M .: Progress-tradition, 2002. - ISBN 5-89826-093-5 .
• Slyunkova I. N. Temples and monasteries of Belarus of the XIX century as part of the Russian Empire: Re-creation of heritage. - M .: Progress-tradition, 2010 .-- ISBN 978-5-89826-326-8 .
• Trusov O.A., Borovoy R.V. Monuments of ancient Mstislavl. To the 850th anniversary of the city. - Mn. : Polymya, 1985 .-- 19 p.
• Tkachev M.A., Trusov O.A. Ancient Mstislavl. - Mn. : Polymya, 1992 .-- 109 p. - ISBN 5-345-00384-X .

• Tupichevsky monastery on Globus.tut.by
• Tupichevsky monastery at Radzima.org
• National Historical Archive of Belarus. Tupichevsky Svyatoduhovskiy monastery