The Virgin in Russia and the Slavic World

The most amazing anecdotes of a people who have loved the Mother of God for a thousand years

In the Slavic world, Marian icons are not just images: they are presences. For a thousand years, from the conversion of Prince Vladímir in 988 to the believers who secretly prayed under Soviet atheism, the Virgin Mary has been for Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Serbs and Bulgarians more than a devotion: it has been a refuge, identity and hope. These are some of the stories that prove it.

The icon of Kazan and the liberation of Moscow (Russia, 1612)

In 1612, the Russian State was on the brink of collapse. After years of the so-called "Time of the Tumours," Polish forces occupied the Moscow Kremlin and a faction of traitors were supporting them. The legitimate Tsar did not exist. The nation seemed doomed to disappear.

The Patriarch Hermogenes, a prisoner of the Poles, sent secret letters to the cities calling for resistance. Before he was killed, he ordered that the icon of the Virgin of Kazan be taken to the front of any army that marched over Moscow. The militia of Nízhniy Novgorod, led by the butcher Kozma Minin and Prince Dmitri Pozharski, responded to the appeal.

In August 1612, Kazan's icon was placed at the head of the army. Before the final attack, the soldiers fasted three days and prayed to the image. On October 22, 1612, Russian forces took the Kremlin. The Poles capitulated. The people of Moscow received their liberators processing with the Kazan icon in tears. Since then, the 4th of November - the day of the Kazan icon - is the National Festival of Russian Unity.

The Virgin of Vladímir in front of Tamerlán (Russia, 1395)

In the summer of 1395, the conqueror Tamerlán - Timur the Cojo - had already swept the Caucasus and the steppe. His armies were unbeatable. Nothing seemed able to stop him before he got to Moscow. The great prince Vasili I ordered to bring to Moscow the most sacred icon of all Russia: the Virgin of Vladímir, an image that tradition attributed to the evangelist Luke, arrived from Constantinople in the 12th century.

The icon was transferred in a solemn procession from Vladímir. The people of Moscow went out on the roads, kneeling for miles to receive him. As the people prayed, Tamerlan - who had already reached Elets, a few days away - inexplicably stopped his progress. He remained in the same place for fifteen days and then, without giving any military explanation, he turned around and withdrew to the south.

His Persian chronists said that the conqueror had had a vision of a woman surrounded by light surrounded by warriors who intimidated him. The Russians needed no more explanation: she was the Mother of God. In the place where the icon crossed the doors of Moscow, the Stretsky Monastery was built, which exists until today.

Czestochowa and the Swedish Flood: Poland under the protection of the Black Virgin (1655)

In 1655, the Kingdom of Poland was about to disappear. The Swedish armies - in what history calls the "Flood" - had invaded the country and occupied almost the entire territory. Polish king John II Casimiro himself fled to exile. Most of the nobility was capitulating before the invader.

There was only one reduction: the Pauline monastery of Jasna Góra, in Czestochowa, which kept the icon of the Black Virgin - Matka Boska Częstochowska. A garrison of about two hundred and seventy men and a community of monks resisted the siege of a Swedish army of several thousand soldiers, with heavy artillery. The former of the monastery, Father Augustine Kordecki, organized the defense with total confidence in the intercession of the Virgin. The siege failed in December 1655.

The news of Czestochowa's miracle turned Poland on. King John II Casimiro returned from exile and on 1 April 1656, in the Cathedral of Lwów (Lopolis), solemnly consecrated Poland to the Virgin Mary and proclaimed her Queen of Poland -Queen of Poland-. In a few months, the entire country rose up against the invader and the Swedes were expelled. The consecration of 1656 continues every year on 3 May, National Day of Poland.

The rosary in the Soviet gulags (Russia, 20th century)

During the decades of Soviet persecution, thousands of priests, religious and lay people were sent to the Gulag work camps. There, in extreme hunger and cold conditions, many kept their faith secret. The rosary - which does not need books or altars, only memory and fingers to count - became the sacrament of prisoners.

One of the most touching testimonies is that of Father Walter Ciszek, an American Jesuit who spent twenty-three years in Soviet prisons and fields (1941-1963). In his book He Leadeth MeHe described how he prayed the rosary mentally during the endless transfers in train wagons, how he taught it to Polish and Ukrainian cellmates, how in the darkest months the Hail Mary was the only thing left of prayer.

Ukrainian women deported to Siberia transmitted the rosary from generation to generation. Many of them, unable to count, used knots in a piece of thread or simply the folds of a dress. When communism fell, some of those improvised rosaries were brought to the churches as relics of fidelity.

The Fatima icon in Russia (1993)

In 1917, the Virgin of Fatima asked for the consecration of Russia and announced that if it were done, Russia would become and there would be peace in the world. Pope John Paul II made the consecration on March 25, 1984, united with all the bishops of the world. Nine years later - in 1991 - the Soviet Union was peacefully dissolved.

In 1993, the pilgrim icon of Our Lady of Fatima traveled Russia for the first time in history. It was received by the authorities of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow - an unprecedented gesture - and by thousands of faithful in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities. In St. Petersburg, a ninety-year-old woman who had survived the Nazi siege of Leningrad praying in secret was photographed by clinging to the icon. "My whole life I waited for this day," he said.

The image of that old woman embracing the Virgin of Fatima turned the world around and became one of the symbols of the end of Soviet atheism as a state faith.

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