Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

"Kazan, the Protector of Russia, and the liberation of Moscow"

Moscow (Russia)

In the early 17th century Russia lived the call «Tiempo de las Turbulencias» (1605-1613), a time of hunger, civil war and foreign occupation. Polish troops became strong in the very heart of Moscow. In 1612a popular militia gathered in Nizhni Novgorod and led by the prince Dmitri Pozharski y el comerciante Kuzmá Minin He managed to expel the occupants and return the capital to Russian hands. The liberation of Moscow in 1612 is a historical fact well documented, still remembered today as one of the great moments of the nation.

In addition to that, there is a tradition that the people love very much: that Pozharski entered Moscow with the icon of the Mother of God of Kazan in his handsand that victory was attributed to the intercession of the Virgin. Tradition adds that, in gratitude, a Marian feast was instituted in memory of that liberation. It is appropriate to be honest: door del icono y la specific institution of the party they belong to the historical-devotional Russian story; they cannot be verified step by step with contemporary documents, and an original decree that we can quote directly no consta. What is certain is liberation; what is endearing is the trust with which the people put it at the feet of the Mother of God.

Since then, the Kazan icon was known as «Protectora de Rusia» (Kazanskaya). The generals took him to the campaign in the decisive hours, as a banner of faith rather than war. Two centuries later, in the face of Napoleon's invasion in 1812, tradition recalls that the marshal Mikhail Kutuzov prayed to Kazan's icon before the campaign that would end with the withdrawal of the Great Armée. That Kutuzov was a devout man and that the icon was venerated in those years is within the credible and transmitted by religious chronicles; the exact detail of each gesture again belongs to the devotional traditionNot a military file.

What these stories reveal is not a talisman of victories, but a people who, in their darkest hours, raised their eyes to the Mother of God and was known to be protected under his mantle. That same trust is the one that beats in every Avemaría del Rosario: to put the very fragility - that of a person, that of a city, that of an entire country - into the hands of which it is Mother, and to let it be she who takes us to her Son.