Vasili III of Russia
Vasili III Ivanovich was the Grand Prince of Moscow from 1505 to 1533. He was the son of Ivan III Vasiliyevich and Sophia Paleologue and was christened with the name Gavriil, he had three brothers: Yuri, born in 1480, born in 1487 and Andrei, born in 1490, as well as five sisters: Elena, another Elena, another Feodosiya and Eudoxia. He is sometimes mockingly referred to as Vasili the Adequate due to his rule taking place between those of Ivan the Great and Ivan the Terrible, as well as the relative uneventfulness of his reign. Vasili III continued the policies of his father Ivan III and spent most of his reign consolidating Ivan's gains. Vasili annexed the last surviving autonomous provinces: Pskov in 1510, appanage of Volokolamsk in 1513, principalities of Ryazan in 1521 and Novgorod-Seversky in 1522. Vasili took advantage of the difficult position of Sigismund of Poland to capture Smolensk, the great eastern fortress of Lithuania, chiefly through the aid of the rebel Lithuanian, Prince Mikhail Glinski, who provided him with artillery and engineers.
The loss of Smolensk was an important injury inflicted by Russia on Lithuania in the course of the Russo-Lithuanian Wars and only the exigencies of Sigismund compelled him to acquiesce in its surrender. In 1521 Vasili received an emissary of the neighboring Iranian Safavid Empire, sent by Shah Ismail I whose ambitions were to construct an Irano-Russian alliance against the common enemy, the Ottoman Empire. Vasili was successful against the Crimean Khanate. Although in 1519 he was obliged to buy off the Crimean khan, Mehmed I Giray, under the walls of Moscow, towards the end of his reign he established Russian influence on the Volga. In 1531–32 he placed the pretender Cangali khan on the throne of Khanate of Kazan. Basil was the first grand-duke of Moscow who adopted the title of tsar and the double-headed eagle of the Byzantine Empire. Regarding internal policy, Vasili III enjoyed the support of the Church in his struggle with the feudal opposition. In 1521, metropolitan Varlaam was banished for refusing to participate in Vasili's fight against an appanage prince, Vasili Ivanovich Shemyachich.
Rurikid princes Vasili Shuisky and Ivan Vorotynsky were sent into exile. The diplomat and statesman, Ivan Bersen-Beklemishev, was executed in 1525 for criticizing Vasili's policies. Maximus the Greek, Vassian Patrikeyev and others were sentenced for the same reason in 1525 and 1531. During the reign of Vasili III, the landownership of the gentry increased, while authorities tried to limit immunities and privileges of boyars and the nobility. By 1526 when he was 47 years old, Vasili had been married to Solomonia Saburova for over 20 years with no heir to his throne being produced. Conscious of her husband's disappointment, Solomonia tried to remedy this by consulting sorcerers and going on pilgrimages; when this proved unsuccessful, Vasili consulted the boyars, announcing that he did not trust his two brothers to handle Russia's affairs. The boyars suggested that he take a new wife, despite much opposition from the clergy, he divorced his barren wife and married Princess Elena Glinskaya, the daughter of a Serbian princess and niece of his friend Michael Glinski.
Not many of the boyars approved of his choice. Vasili was so smitten that he trimmed his beard to appear younger. After three days of matrimonial festivity, the couple consummated their marriage, though it appeared that Elena was as sterile as Solomonia; the Russian populace began to suspect. However, to the great joy of Vasili and the populace, the new tsaritsa gave birth to a son, who would succeed him as Ivan IV. Three years a second son, was born. According to a story, Solomonia Saburova bore a son in the convent where she had been confined, just several months after the controversial divorce. Whilst out hunting on horseback near Volokolamsk, Vasili felt a great pain in his right hip, the result of an abscess, he was transported to the village of Kolp, where he was visited by two German doctors who were unable to stop the infection with conventional remedies. Believing that his time was short, Vasili requested to be returned to Moscow, where he was kept in the Saint Joseph Cathedral along the way.
By 25 November 1533, Vasili asked to be made a monk before dying. Taking on the name Varlaam, Vasili died at midnight, 4 December 1533. Rulers of Russia family tree
Bell tower
A bell tower is a tower that contains one or more bells, or, designed to hold bells if it has none. Such a tower serves as part of a church, will contain church bells, but there are many secular bell towers part of a municipal building, an educational establishment, or a tower built to house a carillon. Church bell towers incorporate clocks, secular towers do, as a public service; the Italian term campanile, deriving from the word campana meaning "bell", is synonymous with bell tower. A bell tower may in some traditions be called a belfry, though this term may refer to the substructure that houses the bells and the ringers rather than the complete tower; the tallest free-standing bell tower in the world, 113.2 metres high, is the Mortegliano Bell Tower, in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, Italy. Bells are rung from a tower to enable them to be heard at a distance. Church bells can signify the time for worshippers to go to church for a communal service, can be an indication of a time to pray, without worshippers coming to the church.
They are rung on special occasions such as a wedding, or a funeral service. In some religious traditions they are used within the liturgy of the church service to signify to people that a particular part of the service has been reached. A bell tower may have a collection of bells which are tuned to a common scale, they may be stationary and chimed, rung randomly by swinging through a small arc, or swung through a full circle to enable the high degree of control of English change ringing. They may house a carillon or chimes, in which the bells are sounded by hammers connected via cables to a keyboard; these can be found in many churches and secular buildings in Europe and America including college and university campuses. A variety of electronic devices exist to simulate the sound of bells, but any substantial tower in which a considerable sum of money has been invested will have a real set of bells; some churches have an exconjuratory in the bell tower, a space where ceremonies were conducted to ward off weather-related calamities, like storms and excessive rain.
The main bell tower of the Cathedral of Murcia has four. In Christianity, many Anglican and Lutheran churches ring their bells from belltowers three times a day, at 6 a.m. noon, 6 p.m. summoning the Christian faithful to recite the Lord’s Prayer, or the Angelus, a prayer recited in honour of the Incarnation of God. In addition, most Christian denominations ring church bells to call the faithful to worship, signalling the start of a mass or service of worship. In many historic Christian churches, church bells are rung during the processions of Candlemas and Palm Sunday; the Christian tradition of the ringing of church bells from a belltower is analogous to Islamic tradition of the adhan from a minaret. Old bell towers which are no longer used for their original purpose may be kept for their historic or architectural value, though in countries with a strong campanological tradition they continue to have the bells rung. In AD 400, Paulinus of Nola introduced church bells into the Christian Church.
By the 11th century, bells housed in belltowers became commonplace. Historic bell towers exist throughout Europe; the Irish round towers are thought to have functioned in part as bell towers. Famous medieval European examples include Bruges, Ghent; the most famous European free-standing bell tower, however, is the so-called "Leaning Tower of Pisa", the campanile of the Duomo di Pisa in Pisa, Italy. In 1999 thirty-two Belgian belfries were added to the UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites. In 2005 this list was extended with one Belgian and twenty-three Northern French belfries and is since known as Belfries of Belgium and France. Most of these were attached to civil buildings city halls, as symbols of the greater power the cities in the region got in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, cities sometimes kept their important documents in belfries. Not all are on a large scale. Archaic wooden bell towers survive adjoining churches in Lithuania and as well as in some parts of Poland. In Orthodox Eastern Europe bell ringing have a strong cultural significance, churches were constructed with bell towers.
Bell towers are common in the countries of related cultures. They may appear both as part of a temple complex and as an independent civic building paired with a drum tower, as well as in local church buildings. Among the best known examples are the Bell Tower of Beijing and the Bell Tower of Xi'an. Bell towers and campaniles by date Bell-gable Clock tower Conjuratory Octagon on cube Zvonnitsa Belfries of Belgium and France, UNESCO World Heritage Centre entry Les Beffrois - France, Pays-Bas, blog describing several bell towers All Saints Bell Tower
Simon Ushakov
Simon Fyodorovich Ushakov was a leading Russian icon painter of the late 17th-century. Together with Fyodor Zubov and Fyodor Rozhnov, he is associated with the comprehensive reform of the Russian Orthodox Church undertaken by Patriarch Nikon. We know nothing about the early years of Simon Ushakov, his birth date is deduced from his inscription on one of the icons: In the year 7166 painted this icon Simon Ushakov son, being 32 years of age. At 22 he became a paid artist of the Silver Chamber, affiliated with the Armory Prikaz; the bright, fresh colours and exquisite, curving lines of his proto-baroque icons caught the eye of Patriarch Nikon, who introduced Simon to the tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. He became a great favourite with the royal family and was assigned to the Kremlin Armoury, run by an educated boyar Bogdan Khitrovo. Ushakov had a lot of pupils and associates and published a short treatise on icon-painting entitled A Word to Loving-Meticulous Icon Painting; some of the more conservative Russian priests, such as archpriest Avvakum, regarded his icons as "lascivious works of devil", for they were too Western for their tastes.
Avvakum, in particular, alleged that Ushakov painted his "fleshly saints" after his own portly appearance. Ushakov executed secular commissions and produced engravings for book illustrations. In other words, he was one of the first secular painters in Russia; some of his icons, transported to Western Europe, were instrumental in fomenting interest for nascent Russian painting. He died on 25 June 1686 in Moscow. Biography of Simon Ushakov by Archimandrit Avgustin – in Russian Chapter on Ushakov and his school from Igor Grabar's History of Russian Art V. N. Alexandrov, History of Russian Art, Minsk, 2004, ISBN 985-13-1199-5 On-line text by Simon Ushakov A Word to Loving-Meticulous Icon Painting – in Russian Simon Ushakov From Alexander Men' dictionary – in Russian
Ascension Convent (Moscow)
Ascension Convent, known as the Starodevichy Convent or Old Maidens' Convent until 1817, was an Orthodox nunnery in the Moscow Kremlin which contained the burials of grand princesses and other noble ladies from the Muscovite royal court. It is believed that Ascension Convent was founded in 1389 next to the Saviour Gates of the Kremlin by Dmitry Donskoy's widow, Eudoxia Dmitriyevna, who would take the veil there; the foundation stone for the cathedral was laid in 1407, just before her death. Eight years the cathedral was gutted by fire and rebuilt in 1467 by princess Maria of Borovsk, wife of Vasili II of Russia. Sixteen years the convent was again damaged by fire and restored in 1518–1519 to a design by Aloisio the New; this church was rebuilt in 1587–1588, when a new five-domed structure, mirroring the nearby Archangel Cathedral, was erected. It was a major monument to embody the conservative architectural approach of Boris Godunov's circle. Among those buried in the cathedral vault were Sophia Vitovtovna, Sophia Paleologue, several wives of Ivan the Terrible, Grand Duchess Eudoxia Alexeyevna, tsarina Maria Vladimirovna.
The convent was used as a residence for royal fiancees prior to the wedding. It was there that Ivan IV's widow, Maria Nagaya, greeted Marina Mnishek, who would spend there a few days before her wedding with Nagaya's purported son, False Dmitry I. In 1634, Michael I of Russia commissioned a new convent church to be built and dedicated to his patron saint, Michael Maleinos. A belltower next to this church was constructed in the late 17th century; the Church of Michael Maleinos used to be home to a rare sculpture of St George, made by Vasili Yermolin and installed there in 1808. In 1721, the convent was renovated on behest of Peter the Great. In 1737, it was again renovated by the order of Anna Ioannovna. During the Patriotic War of 1812, the sacristy of Ascension Convent, with the Icon of the Virgin Hodegetria, painted by Dionisius in 1482, was moved to Vologda. A two-storey almshouse was added in 1823, but the most important 19th-century addition was the Church of Saint Catherine, built to a fanciful Neo-Gothic design by Carlo Rossi.
By 1907, the monastery had 62 nuns and 45 lay sisters. Ten years the ancient buildings were damaged by artillery fire during the October Revolution. In 1929, the convent complex - including the majestic 16th-century cathedral - was dismantled by the Soviets in order to make room for the Red Commanders School, named after the All-Russian Central Executive Committee; some of the icons of Ascension Convent were made over to the State Tretyakov Gallery and State museums of the Moscow Kremlin. The iconostasis of the Ascension Cathedral was moved into the Cathedral of Twelve Apostles, while the tombs of the Muscovite royalty were transferred into an annex of the Archangel Cathedral, where they reside to this day. On August 2014, Russian president Vladimir Putin suggested an idea for restoring Ascension Convent and Chudov Monastery. However, due to archaeological work which began in December 2015 and UNESCO's disapproval of the restoration, the restoration of Ascension Convent is unplanned. During archaeological work, experts have managed to find a foundation of Chudov Monastery and Ascension Convent.
Account of the convent Account of the cathedral
Religious order
A religious order is a lineage of communities and organizations of people who live in some way set apart from society in accordance with their specific religious devotion characterized by the principles of its founder's religious practice. The order is composed of laypeople and, in some orders, clergy. Religious orders exist in many of the world's religions. In Buddhist societies, a religious order is one of the number of monastic orders of monks and nuns, many of which follow under a different school of teaching, such as Thailand's Dhammayuttika order - a monastic order founded by King Mongkut. A well-known Chinese Buddhist order is the ancient Shaolin order in Ch'an Buddhism and in modern times the Order of Hsu Yun. A Catholic religious institute is a society whose members pronounce vows that are accepted by a superior in the name of the Church and who live a life of brothers or sisters in common. Catholic religious orders and congregations are the two historical categories of Catholic religious institutes.
Religious institutes are distinct from secular institutes, another kind of institute of consecrated life, from lay ecclesial movements. In the Catholic Church, members of religious institutes, unless they are deacons or priests in Holy Orders, are not clergy, but belong to the laity. While the state of consecrated life is neither clerical nor lay, institutes themselves are classified as one or the other, a clerical institute being one that "by reason of the purpose or design intended by the founder or by virtue of legitimate tradition, is under the direction of clerics, assumes the exercise of sacred orders, is recognized as such by the authority of the Church". Well-known Roman Catholic religious institutes, not all of which were classified as "orders" rather than "congregations", include Augustinians, Carmelites, Franciscans, Piarists, Oblates of Mary Immaculate and the Congregation of Holy Cross. Several religious orders evolved during the Crusades to incorporate a military mission thus became "religious military orders", such as the Knights of the Order of Saint John.
It is typical of non-monastic religious institutes to have a motherhouse or generalate that has jurisdiction over any number of dependent religious communities, for its members to be moved by their superior general to any other of its communities, as the needs of the institute at any one time demand. In accordance with the concept of independent communities in the Rule of St Benedict, the Benedictines have autonomous abbeys. Hence they can not move -- abbess -- to another abbey. An "independent house" may make a new foundation which remains a "dependent house" until it is granted independence by Rome and itself becomes an abbey; the autonomy of each house does not prevent them being affiliated into congregations – whether national or based on some other joint characteristic – and these, in turn, form the supra-national Benedictine Confederation. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, there is only one type of monasticism; the profession of monastics is considered by monks to be a Sacred Mystery. The Rite of Tonsure is printed in the Euchologion, the same book as the other Sacred Mysteries and services performed according to need.
See also: Active Lutheran orders Martin Luther had concerns with the spiritual value of monastic life at the time of the Reformation. After the foundation of the Lutheran Churches, some monasteries in Lutheran lands and convents adopted the Lutheran Christian faith. Other examples of Lutheran religious orders include the "Order of Lutheran Franciscans" in the United States. A Lutheran religious order following the Rule of St. Benedict, "The Congregation of the Servants of Christ," was established at St. Augustine's House in Oxford, Michigan, in 1958 when some other men joined Father Arthur Kreinheder in observing the monastic life and offices of prayer; this order has strong ties in Germany. In 2011, an Augustinian religious order, the Priestly Society of St. Augustine was established by the Anglo-Lutheran Catholic Church, its headquarters is at Christ Lutheran Church ALCC. Kent Island, Fr. Jens Bargmann, Ph. D. is the Grand Prior. Religious orders in England were dissolved by King Henry VIII upon the separation of the English church from Roman primacy.
For three hundred years, there were no formal religious orders in Anglicanism, although some informal communities – such as that founded by Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding – sprang into being. With the advent of the Oxford Movement in the Church of England and worldwide Anglicanism in the middle of the 19th century, several orders appeared. In 1841, the first order for women was established; the first order for men was founded 25 years later. Anglican religious voluntarily commit themselves for life, or a term of years, to holding their possessions in common or in trust. There are presently thirteen active religious orders for men, fifty-three for women, eight mixed gender; the Methodist Church of Great Britain, its ancestors, have established a number of orders of Deaconesses
Russian Orthodox Church
The Russian Orthodox Church, alternatively known as the Moscow Patriarchate, is one of the autocephalous Eastern Orthodox Christian churches. The Primate of the ROC is the Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus'; the ROC, as well as the primate thereof ranks fifth in the Orthodox order of precedence below the four ancient patriarchates of the Greek Orthodox Church, those of Constantinople, Alexandria and Jerusalem. Since 15 October 2018, the ROC is not in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, having unilaterally severed ties in reaction to the establishment of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, finalised by the Ecumenical Patriarchate on 5 January 2019; the Christianization of Kievan Rus' seen as the birth of the ROC, is believed to have occurred in 988 through the baptism of the Kievan prince Vladimir and his people by the clergy of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, whose constituent part the ROC remained for the next six centuries, while the Kievan see remained in the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate until 1686.
The ROC claims its exclusive jurisdiction over the Orthodox Christians, irrespective of their ethnic background, who reside in the former member republics of the Soviet Union, excluding Georgia and Armenia, although this claim is disputed in such countries as Estonia and Ukraine and parallel canonical Orthodox jurisdictions exist in those: the Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church, the Metropolis of Bessarabia, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, respectively. It exercises ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the autonomous Church of Japan and the Orthodox Christians resident in the People's Republic of China; the ROC branches in Belarus, Latvia and Ukraine since the 1990s enjoy various degrees of self-government, albeit short of the status of formal ecclesiastical autonomy. The ROC should not be confused with the Orthodox Church in America, another autocephalous Orthodox church, that traces its existence in North America to the time of the Russian missionaries in Alaska in the late 18th century; the ROC should not be confused with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, headquartered in the United States.
The ROCOR was instituted in the 1920s by Russian communities outside Communist Russia, which refused to recognize the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate de facto headed by Metropolitan Sergius Stragorodsky. The two churches reconciled on May 17, 2007; the Christian community that developed into what is now known as the Russian Orthodox Church is traditionally said to have been founded by the Apostle Andrew, thought to have visited Scythia and Greek colonies along the northern coast of the Black Sea. According to one of the legends, Andrew reached the future location of Kiev and foretold the foundation of a great Christian city; the spot where he erected a cross is now marked by St. Andrew's Cathedral. By the end of the first millennium AD, eastern Slavic lands started to come under the cultural influence of the Eastern Roman Empire. In 863–69, the Byzantine monks Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius, both from the region of Macedonia in the Eastern Roman Empire translated parts of the Bible into the Old Church Slavonic language for the first time, paving the way for the Christianization of the Slavs and Slavicized peoples of Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Southern Russia.
There is evidence that the first Christian bishop was sent to Novgorod from Constantinople either by Patriarch Photius or Patriarch Ignatios, c. 866–867. By the mid-10th century, there was a Christian community among Kievan nobility, under the leadership of Bulgarian and Byzantine priests, although paganism remained the dominant religion. Princess Olga of Kiev was the first ruler of Kievan Rus′, born a Christian, her grandson, Vladimir of Kiev, made Rus' a Christian state. The official Christianization of Kievan Rus' is believed to have occurred in 988 AD, when Prince Vladimir was baptised himself and ordered his people to be baptised by the priests from the Eastern Roman Empire; the Kievan church was a junior metropolitanate of the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Ecumenical Patriarch appointed the metropolitan, a Greek, who governed the Church of Rus'. The Kiev Metropolitan's residence was located in Kiev itself, the capital of the medieval Rus' state; as Kiev was losing its political and economical significance due to the Mongol invasion, Metropolitan Maximus moved to Vladimir in 1299.
Following the tribulations of the Mongol invasion, the Russian Church was pivotal in the survival and life of the Russian state. Despite the politically motivated murders of Mikhail of Chernigov and Mikhail of Tver, the Mongols were tolerant and granted tax exemption to the church; such holy figures as Sergius of Radonezh and Metropolitan Alexis helped the country to withstand years of Mongol rule, to expand both economically and spiritually. The Trinity monastery founded by Sergius of Radonezh became the setting for the flourishing of spiritual art, exemplified by the work of Andrey Rublev, among others; the followers of Sergius founded four hundred monasteries, thus extending the geographical extent of the Grand Duchy of Moscow. In 1439, at t
