The Mother of God of Hodigitria

Kazan Icon of the Mother of God Hodegetria The Kazan icon of Hodegetria in the half-figure depiction of the Mother of God with Christ on the right side permanently entered the history of Russia - see S.12770MŁ; S.12773MŁ; S.12778MŁ. In its honour, the first rulers from the Romanov dynasty established two local holidays, later elevated to general holidays, celebrating the apparition of the icon in Kazan on the 21st of July 1579 and the capture of Moscow by the troops of Dmitry Pozharsky on the 4th of November 1612 - respectively, July 8 and October 22 in the Julian calendar. Michael I Romanov erected a church for the Moscow image. Tsar Alexis, celebrating the birth of Dmitri, his heir to the throne, recognised the Kazan icon as the intercessor of the House of Romanov. At the start of the 18th c., a copy of the icon was brought to the new capital - St. Petersburg, and in 1811, it was placed in the new Kazan Cathedral. Mikhail Kutuzov ordered himself to be blessed with it when he went against Napoleon in 1812. After casting out the French, the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg became a memento of the Russian victory. In Kazan, the original icon, despite the well-developed cult, was stolen, stripped of valuables, and destroyed in 1904. However, even in the communist period, during the Second World War, the intercession of the Kazan Hodegetria was trusted to stop the Germans from capturing Moscow and entering Leningrad (St. Persburg). In these cities, with Stalin's assent, processions with the icon of the Kazan Mother of God took place, and the prayer for her intercession contributed to halting the Germans at Stalingrad. One of the eighteenth-century copies of the image, transported out of Russia after the 1917 revolution, found itself in the Vatican; given to the Patriarchate of Moscow in 2004, it was moved to Kazan. Since 2005, in reference to the protective role of the Kazan Mother of God, the National Unity Day was established in Russia, in place of the previous holiday commemorating the October Revolution. Teresa Bagińska-Żurawska https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9243-3967