October 14/1 – Intercession of the Blessed Virgin Marytranslated

The Feast of the Intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary came to Rus' from Byzantium and became one of the most revered. The events of this holiday are based on the vision of the Intercession of the Mother of God, which was revealed to St. Andrei Yurodivoy and his disciple Epiphanius in the middle of the 10th century. in Constantinople under Emperor Leo the Wise.

At this time, the Byzantine Empire was threatened by the Saracens. They attacked Constantinople with large forces and threatened it with destruction.

It is difficult for a modern person to understand what Byzantine culture was for the rest of Europe: there is nothing to compare it with. Literacy in the territory of modern France or Germany was a rare phenomenon even among the nobility (Emperor Charlemagne was taught to read with difficulty only at the age of forty!), there were almost no real cities, roads and hygiene were very conditional. A guest from the European hinterland who arrived in the Roman Empire could not recover from amazement for the rest of his life. Clean, well-kept cities with sewerage and running water, a network of comfortable and smooth roads, a post office, palace-like public baths, a literate population and a comprehensively educated aristocracy, in a word, everything that is called “civilization.”

And all this was in mortal danger.

Seeing no help from anywhere, the Greeks...