Novodevushi Monastery

A three hour tour of the Novodevushi Monastery. Includes museum tickets and photographs.

 

This is perhaps the most peaceful and charming of Moscow tours.
Four hour walking tour of monastery and cemetery. Tour price includes tickets and transport.

Novodevichy, or "New Maidens Convent" in English, was founded by Vasily III in 1524 to commemorate the recapture of Smolensk from the Lithuanians in 1514. Novodevichy was Moscow's richest convents and many wives and widows of tsars and boyars entered the convent. The convent came under attack in 1812, when Napoleon ordered that the entire Novodevichy complex be destroyed as he and his French troops withdrew from Moscow after the long and grueling campaign of that year. The nuns of the convent discovered the lit candles scattered around the straw-filled Church of John the Baptist and the smoldering fuses leading to barrels of gunpowder stacked in the cellar of the Smolensky Cathedral just in time to extinguish them and save the Novodevushi Monastery and convent from destruction.

Among the famous buried in the charming overgrown cemetery adjacent are Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, Mikhail Bulgakov, the poet Maiakovskii, singer Chaliapin and composer Skriabin, plus Stalin's wife and last but not least, the black-and-white headstone devoted to former Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev. Its easy to spend an afternoon wandering the peaceful and interesting grounds of Novodevushi Monastery

 

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