- tours@st-petersburg-visit.com
- +7 921 946 36 85
- +7 812 313 17 26
- Skype: Marina S. Wilson
CITY TOUR AND NOVODEVICHY CONVENT
Combine the city highlights tour with a visit to the Novodevichy Convent (Convent of the New Maidens), a dazzling architectural gem with walls of white brick, red-capped towers and gleaming onion domes. The adjacent Novodevichy cemetery is Moscow’s most prestigious resting place after the Kremlin wall. The Novodevichy Convent was founded by Grand Prince Basil III in 1524 to commemorate the capture of Smolensk from the Lithuanians, an important step in Moscow’s conquest of the old Kyivan Rus lands. The convent also served as an important link in the chain of fortified monasteries that surrounded Moscow. It was staffed almost exclusively by daughters of the nobility and even by members of the royal family. Peter the Great’s half sister Sofia used it as the second residence when she ruled Russia as regent in the 1680s. Then she was imprisoned here for life by Peter the Great after having initiated the Streletsy rebellion. Later she was joined by Peter the Great ‘s first wife, Evdokia Lopuhina. When Napoleon arrived in Moscow in 1812 he gave orders for the now dilapidated building to be blown up but at the last moment an unknown hero managed to extinguish the fuses. The oldest part of the convent is the white stone Virgin of Smolensk Cathedral dating back to 1524-25. The walls of the cathedral are covered with frescoes of the XVI century and there is a huge iconostasis donated by Sofia. Just outside the southern walls is the cemetery, final resting place of numerous illustrious Russians, including writers Gogol and Chekhov, the film director Eisenstein, the composer Prokofiev, Stanislavsky and others. Pick up time: 10.00 a.m.
|
