Syandeba, Republic of Karelia, Russia
Photo: eparhia10.ru
The 800th anniversary of the Baptism of Karelia and the 450th anniversary of the Syandema Dormition Convent were marked last week with the solemn consecration of the convent’s Church of the Holy Twelve Apostles.
His Eminence Metropolitan Konstantin of Petrozavodsk and Karelia presided over the ceremony on February 27, the feast day of St. Cyril, Equal-to-the-Apostles and Teacher of the Slavs, the diocese reports.
The church has an unusual origin: it was built on a site revealed to a donor in a dream in which the Apostle Jude, brother of James, appeared to him. After recently receiving a new iconostasis, it was finally ready for consecration.
The day itself produced a striking natural occurrence. The convent had been blanketed in snow throughout the night before the celebration, but during the procession around the church, the snow gave way to February rain that immediately froze upon contact with surfaces, coating the tree branches and cupolas in a layer of ice.
Photo: eparhia10.ru
The services celebrated that day included the Great Lenten Hours, the Typica, the rite of consecration, and the first Hierarchical Liturgy celebrated in the church—the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts. Following the prayer behind the ambon, the canon to the Great Martyr Theodore Tyron was read and koliva was blessed.
At the close of the service, Met. Konstantin addressed the abbess of the convent, Mother Varvara (Ivanova), and the sisters, presenting the monastery with an icon of St. Dalmat of Iset with a particle of his relics.
Speaking to the sisters, the Metropolitan shared the history of the saint, who had labored in the Ural region where the hierarch himself served as ruling bishop for seven years:
Sisters, I congratulate you wholeheartedly… You are being presented with this icon of the Venerable Dalmat of Iset. He is a great saint… We gathered information about his life. He was first glorified as a locally venerated saint, and then was added to the roster of saints for universal veneration at an Hierarchical Council. His holy relics were uncovered.
Abbess Varvara thanked the Мetropolitan on behalf of the community for the joy of shared prayer and the great spiritual consolation.
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Photo: syandema.cerkov.ru
The Syandema Dormition Convent was founded in the second half of the 16th century by St. Athanasius of Syandema, a disciple of St. Alexander of Svir, who withdrew into the Karelian forests and established a hermitage between two lakes near the town of Olonets. The monastery flourished until the early 17th century, when Lithuanian and Swedish incursions devastated it. It was subsequently closed during Russia’s monastic reforms, revived in the 19th century, and reconstituted as a convent in 1909 with a missionary focus in the Karelian region.
The Soviet period brought total destruction: the property was nationalized, the churches desecrated, and the remaining structures were caught in the crossfire of the 1941 fighting along the Svir front and later dismantled by local residents, leaving not even a foundation. The convent was reestablished by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2011, following the first Divine Liturgy celebrated on the site in nearly 90 years in January 2010.
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