Nikolo-Shartomsky Monastery: A Russian Orthodox Monastic Complex in Russia

Site at a Glance

Rating

★4.8

Popularity

Low

Country

Russia

Primary era

Early Modern

Eras represented

Early Modern, Modern

Civilizations

Russian

Site type

Religious

Remains

Fortified Monastery

History

Nikolo-Shartomsky Monastery is a Russian Orthodox men’s monastery in Vvedenye, Russia, whose architectural ensemble developed chiefly from the second half of the seventeenth through the first half of the nineteenth century. It belongs to the Shuya Eparchy, an Orthodox territorial diocese, and is the largest monastery in both the eparchy and Ivanovo Region.

Origins and early importance

The monastery’s exact foundation date and circumstances are unknown. Monastic tradition places its origin no later than the fourteenth century, while another broad dating assigns its foundation to the thirteenth or fourteenth century. One tradition tells of a pious peasant woman who found a small icon of Saint Nicholas near the Shakhma River, then known as the Shartoma. Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker, also called Nicholas of Myra, was a fourth-century Christian bishop widely venerated in Eastern Christianity. A different tradition attributes the monastery’s beginning to monks who fled Suzdal after the Mongol-Tatar invasion.

The monastery first appears in a spiritual charter dated either 1425 or 1444. Konon, its archimandrite, a senior monastic leader, signed the charter, which recorded the transfer of land by Maria, an appanage princess who became the nun Marina. The land included property granted to the Shartoma Monastery. The presence of an archimandrite and the extent of the holdings show that the community had already acquired considerable social standing.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the monastery served as a burial place for the Gorbaty-Shuisky princes, a branch of the wider Shuisky princely family. Their ancestors were traditionally believed to have been buried there from an early period, near the church of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker.

Privileges, raids, and rebuilding

In 1506, Grand Prince Vasily III, who ruled Moscow from 1505 to 1533, issued a charter exempting the monastery from ordinary judicial jurisdiction. In 1553, Ivan IV granted it villages that had formerly belonged to the estate of the Gorbaty princes. These grants increased the monastery’s resources and strengthened its position.

The Time of Troubles, a period of political and dynastic crisis in Russia during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, brought severe destruction. Polish-Lithuanian forces, Circassians, Cossacks, and other armed groups raided the monastery and its estates. They took icons, liturgical vessels, vestments, and the archimandrite’s ceremonial hat, while livestock and grain were seized. Buildings and villages were burned, and monks, servants, and peasants were killed or taken captive. Brigands plundered the monastery again in 1624, killing several monks and taking the treasury.

In 1645, during the tenure of Archimandrite Ioasaf, lightning was blamed for a fire that destroyed the monastery. The community was rebuilt in stone on a new site closer to the mouth of the Molokhta, near the meeting of the Molokhta and Teza Rivers. Saint Nicholas Cathedral became the first stone building of the renewed monastery.

Peasants from the monastery’s estates provided much of the money for the new cathedral. It was consecrated in 1651 with the blessing of Serapion, Archbishop of Suzdal and Tarusa. The date on a cross erected on the cathedral may refer to an earlier or simultaneous consecration, so work may have continued into the second half of the 1650s.

Trade and eighteenth-century administration

The monastery’s position near the river confluence encouraged commercial activity. An annual Saint Nicholas fair took place beneath its walls until the middle of the nineteenth century and drew merchants from nearby areas, including the Upper Volga. During the eighteenth century, nobles from Shuya District and merchants from Yaroslavl, Rostov Veliky, Kineshma, and Shuya supported the monastery.

Catherine II’s secularization reform of 1764 transferred substantial monastic estates to the state and reorganized many religious communities. Before the reform, Nikolo-Shartomsky Monastery headed nine affiliated monasteries, among them the Shuya Trinity Monastery, Kozmodemyansk Hermitage, Epiphany Monastery in Mstera, Gorodishche Hermitage, and the Kazan Monastery in Kokhma. The reform reduced Nikolo-Shartomsky to a third-class institution with twelve monks. It was thereafter governed by abbots rather than archimandrites.

Nineteenth-century decline

The loss of its estates weakened the monastery economically. Its fairs became less important during the nineteenth century after the railway between Shuya and Ivanovo-Voznesensk diverted travelers from the route near the monastery. By the late nineteenth century, the community could not maintain its buildings adequately. It appealed to the Holy Synod, Orthodox donors, and benefactors, while factory owners from Shuya and Ivanovo-Voznesensk also gave financial assistance.

Closure, restoration, and renewed religious life

The monastery closed in the mid-1920s. Its cells became housing for residents of Vvedenye whose homes had been destroyed by a major fire. The churches later served as warehouses for the local collective farm and then the Shuisky state farm, a use that continued until the beginning of the 1980s.

The architectural complex received federal state protection as a monument of religious architecture in 1960. Restoration began in the mid-1980s, first under the Ivanovo scientific restoration and production workshop and later under the monastery’s brethren. When the complex was returned to the Russian Orthodox Church in autumn 1990, several buildings had already become ruins. The monastery was among the first in the Soviet Union to return to religious use. In 2013, the diocesan administration of the newly established Shuya Eparchy was based there.

More than one hundred residents now live at the monastery, which undertakes construction, repairs, agricultural work, spiritual activity, and education. Daily services follow the monastic rule. The monastery’s affiliated compounds include churches in Ivanovo, Shuya, Yuryevets, and Palekh, and it operates a boys’ orphanage in Ivanovo.

The former riverside shrine also regained a place in the monastery’s religious life. A nineteenth-century chapel and healing spring once marked the venerated site near Fedosovo on the Shartoma or Shakhma. On the feast commemorating the transfer of Saint Nicholas’s relics to Bari, the brethren and local residents traditionally recited an akathist, a structured Orthodox hymn of praise, there. The chapel was destroyed during the Soviet period. In 2011, Archimandrite Nikon blessed the revival of a small procession from Vvedenye to the riverbank. A cross-procession now takes place on the first Sunday after 11 August, and a small cross stands beside the river. Discovery of the destroyed chapel’s foundation in 2014 led to the installation of a wooden cross-chapel with an inscription recalling the miraculous appearance of the Saint Nicholas icon.

Remains

The surviving ensemble is organized around stone churches and monastic buildings enclosed by walls with towers. Its principal elements are Saint Nicholas Cathedral, the Church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God, the gate Church of the Transfiguration of the Savior, monks’ cells, enclosing walls, and a five-tier bell tower. The complex combines seventeenth-century ecclesiastical construction with later regional Classical architecture and nineteenth-century additions.

Monastery churches

Saint Nicholas Cathedral

Saint Nicholas Cathedral is the oldest building in the monastery and the center of its architectural ensemble. Built in the 1650s after the fire of 1645, it is a stone cathedral with five domes. Its consecration is associated with 1651, although construction may have continued later in that decade. The cathedral represents the first major stage of the monastery’s rebuilding on its new site near the Molokhta and Teza Rivers.

Church of the Kazan Icon

The Church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God was completed and consecrated in 1678. It forms part of the principal group of surviving monastic churches created during the expansion of the stone ensemble in the second half of the seventeenth century.

Gate Church of the Transfiguration

The gate Church of the Transfiguration of the Savior occupies the entrance-building group and was begun when its foundation stone was laid in 1696. Completion and consecration took place only in 1813. The church is a well-preserved example of regional architecture from the first third of the nineteenth century and was built in the Classical style.

Its central square volume rises in two levels. A projecting section on the lower level carries a four-column portico in the Tuscan order, a simple classical order with plain columns and capitals. The second level contains a tripartite semicircular window. Above it, a shallow vault supports octagonal blind drums at the corners, each crowned by an onion-shaped cupola on a conical neck.

An octagonal drum rises above the center and contains a Serlian window, a three-part opening with a central arch flanked by narrower side openings. Its dome carries a cupola matching those at the corners in form and size. The four corner cupolas and the raised central cupola are described as representing the four Evangelists with Christ at the center.

The architect is not securely established. The construction date and design have led to a possible attribution to Gaudenzio Marichelli, an Italian architect who worked in Shuya District at the time. The Transfiguration Church is described as the only surviving work attributed to him in Ivanovo Region and one of two surviving works attributed to him in Russia. The other is the Church of Saint Sergius of Radonezh, built in 1810. His other attributed buildings include the Church of Saint Nicholas and Trinity Cathedral in the Pokrovsky Monastery ensemble in Ivanovo, both destroyed during the Soviet period, and the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin in Mikhailovskoye, which is heavily ruined.

Enclosure and service buildings

Cells and enclosing walls

The monks’ cells and the enclosing walls with towers date from the middle of the nineteenth century. Together they define the monastery’s residential and defensive boundary around the earlier church buildings, forming the later architectural framework of the complex.

Bell tower

The five-tier bell tower incorporates building phases that extend from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Its successive construction history reflects the long development of the monastery’s architectural ensemble.

Former riverside shrine

Chapel site beside the Shartoma

Near Fedosovo, beside the Shartoma or Shakhma River, the former chapel site is marked by the discovered chapel foundation, a small cross, and a later wooden cross-chapel. These features identify the place associated with the miraculous appearance of the Saint Nicholas icon and preserve the physical focus of the monastery’s older riverside tradition.