Akathistos

Margarita Tuchkova and the Community (continued)

In 1837, on the 25th anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, there was a service held on the spot where the battle had taken place.  The tzar was present, and overcome with Margarita’s piety, asked if there was any way that he could help her.  She replied that she wished he would free her brother, who had been banished to Siberia.  The tzar obligued.

Soon after, Margarita met with Metropolitan Filaret, and he sugessted that she become a nun, but she was hesistant and requested to think it over; then eventually agreed.

In 1838, the Synod “approved the elevation of the community to a communal women’s monastery.  Margarita was tonsured on the Feast of the Apostles, and was given the name Mariia.  The following day, Filaret consecrated Mariia both as abbess and as a deaconess, or consecrated widow.

The Spaso-Borodino community held women of great divirsity- social origin, education, and background.  Mariia became like a mother to the women of the monastery, throwing “herself into the role and the reality of acting as mother to the sisters of the community, her newfound family.”  She the sisters greatly, but we criticized for being an “insufficient disciplinarian.”

Mariia died in 1852, at the age of seventy-one.  She had perserved the qualities of a woman of her upbringing throughout her life, and this brought women of all backgrounds to the monastery.  A communal monastery was a rare thing in Russia at the time; especially where “each served the other with work appropriate to her abilities, and it was severely forbidden to accept payment from one another.” Her “outstanding characteristic was her generosity, her charity to the poor and the unfortunate,” and she was a woman of great empathy for others.

By her death, the small community that Mariia helped to create had grown to 200 women.  By 1911, the monastery had 715 acres of land, a parish school, a small hospital, and an almshouse.  There was an abbess, fifty tonsured sisters, and 195 novices.  Interestingly, in 1914, of the 50 tonsured nuns at that time, 33 were of peasant origin, 13 from lower artisan class, two from nobility, one from the merchant class, and one from the clerical class.  Mariia was able to create a monastery for all women, not just those who were able to afford it.

Tomorrow… the story of Anastasiia Logacheva, Hermit and Staritsa