Hodegetria, Mother of God of Kazan

One of the variants of the iconographic depiction of Hodegetria, particularly venerated in Russia, is the image of the Mother of God of Kazan. It presents a bust of the Virgin, with the blessing Christ Child always shown frontally. The icon was revealed in 1579, when it was discovered under the ashes of the fire-ravaged city of Kazan, as indicated by a nine-year-old girl. The icon was attributed miraculous powers, and a women's monastery dedicated to the Mother of God with an Orthodox church was built (the feast of the icon falls on 8 July, according to the Julian calendar). The original icon from Kazan was stolen and destroyed in 1904, but many historical copies of the lost original exist. The first copy was made for Tsar Ivan the Terrible in 1579, and another, painted for Tsar Peter I, was sent to St. Petersburg, where it was placed in the newly built Kazan Cathedral in 1811. Another copy, brought to Moscow in 1611 by the army of Dmitry Pozharsky, was venerated after the defeat of King Władysław IV and the expulsion of the Poles from Moscow. To celebrate this event, a special feast day was established in the Russian Orthodox Church on 22 October (Julian calendar). Many churches were built in honour of the icon, among the most notable are the Kazan Cathedral on Red Square in Moscow (1636) and the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg. Before the 1917 revolution, the image was present in almost every Russian Orthodox home as part of private worship. The veneration of the Kazan Hodegetria survived the Soviet era and was revived with renewed strength after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Teresa Bagińska-Żurawska https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9243-3967