St. Anastasia's Monastery (Convent) was founded in the 15th century by Anastasiya (Anastasia), the first wife of Ivan the Terrible, and later it was incorporated into the Epiphany Convent of St. Anastasia. Earlier, the abodes existed separately: the Epiphany Friary and two convents, the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross and St. Anastasia's Convent. It is believed that the Epiphany Monastery was founded by starets ("elder") Nicetas, a student and companion of St. Sergius of Radonezh. Originally, all the abode's buildings were made of wood. The Epiphany Cathedral (1559) was its first stone building.
In ten years, St. Anastasia's Convent was refounded on its original site under the name of St. Anastasia's Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross. The Convent had a school for young female clergy, an art workshop and a gold-embroidery workshop, an almshouse for elderly nuns and a hospital for elderly clergy.
It took a long time to refound the Epiphany Monastery. The construction works were funded with the money sent by the mother of Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich, by the boyars Saltykov and by Moscow patriarchs.
The Epiphany Cathedral was painted in 1667 by the masters Gury Nikitin and Sila Savin; unfortunately, the ancient frescoes have not survived. After the 1847 fire, the friary was dissolved and its property was handed over to the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross.
That time marked a new page in the history of the Monastery. The Cathedral's appearance changed a lot. At various times, multiple blocks were erected. It was not by accident that the hospital block was built. The Monastery became famous all over Russia due to its activity of organising hospitals for common people. During the 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War and during the First World War, the community of the sisters of mercy provided help to ill and wounded Russian soldiers. And in 1904, during the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War, a unit of the Convent's students was sent to the Far East. The block was well-equipped. At the Convent's school, students were taught the duties of sisters of mercy both theoretically and practically. For many years, the Epiphany Convent of St. Anastasia was not used for its intended purpose; its church plate was stolen and works of Kievan Russian art were destroyed by fires.
The wonder-working icon of Our Lady of St. Theodore is the Convent's main sacred object.
The icon was found by St. Prince Yury Vsevolodovich (1238) in a dilapidated wooden chapel near the ancient city of Gorodets, and after the prince's death it became a devotional icon of St. Blessed Grand Prince Aleksandr Nevsky. In 1263, after St. Aleksandr Nevsky had passed away, the icon miraculously appeared in the city of Kostroma, in the land ruled by his younger brother Prince Vasily Yaroslavich.
According to a legend, which has survived in written sources, on the second day after the Dormition of the Mother of God, 16 August, when Prince Vasily went hunting to the countryside, to the Zaprudna River, he saw a beautiful icon of Our Lady in a tree. The clergymen, summoned by the prince from the city, removed the found sacred object from the tree, brought it to Kostroma in a solemn procession of the cross and placed the icon in the city's Cathedral of Great Martyr Theodore Stratelates. To commemorate this, the icon was named the Icon of St. Theodore. The day of the finding of the icon, 16 August, became a church feast. As a patron of the family, the St. Theodore Icon became famous with many instances of wonder-working and bless healing. It was in front of the Wonderworking St. Theodore Icon that on 14 March 1613 the young Mikhail Romanov was elected to the throne of the Russian state. At that time, another feast was associated with an icon, to be celebrated on 14 March.
The St. Theodore Icon's distinctive feature is the fact that it is double-sided: its reverse side contains a depiction of St. Martyr Paraskevi of Iconium.
On 18 August 1991, the Wonder-Working Icon was translated to the Kostroma's Cathedral.
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