November 4/October 22 – celebration of the Kazan Icon of the Blessed Virgin Marytranslated

On this day we remember the wondrous Kazan Icon of the Mother of God “for the sake of deliverance from the Poles in 1612.” This means that we are talking about the events of the Time of Troubles. But the image itself was acquired more than thirty years earlier. The appearance of the miraculous icon of the Mother of God in the city of Kazan occurred on July 8, 1579. On June 28, 1579, a terrible fire that started near the Church of St. Nicholas of Tula destroyed part of the city and turned half of the Kazan Kremlin to ashes. The fans of Mohammed gloated, thinking that God was angry with the Christians. “The Faith of Christ,” says the chronicler, “has become a byword and a reproach.” But the fire in Kazan was an omen of the final fall of Islam and the establishment of Orthodoxy throughout the Golden Horde land, the future East of the Russian state. The city soon began to rise from the ruins. Together with other fire victims, the archer Daniil Onuchin was building a house not far from where the fire started.

The Mother of God appeared in a dream vision to his nine-year-old daughter Matrona and ordered her to retrieve Her icon, which had been buried in the ground during the reign of Muslims by secret confessors of Orthodoxy. They did not pay attention to the girl’s words. The Mother of God appeared three times and pointed out the place where the miraculous icon was hidden...