Rybinsk, Russia’s Yaroslavl region, July 11, 2016
On July 9, 2016, the feast of the Tikhvin icon of the Mother of God, a Divine Liturgy was celebrated above one of the monasteries that had been flooded by the Rybinsk Reservoir – the St. Athanasius Convent near Mologa. This convent once kept a venerated Tikhvin icon of the Mother of God, reports the Rybinsk Diocese’s press service.
According to tradition, the icon was brought from the city of Yaroslavl by Mikhail Davidovich, Prince of Mologa, as his father’s blessing. After the Revolution the icon was removed from the convent and taken to the museum of Mologa. During the campaign of confiscation of metal objects from museums initiated by the USSR government the icon disappeared.
The Divine Liturgy on that commemoration day was celebrated by Bishop Benjamin of Rybinsk and Danilov with Archpriest Vasily Denisov, Priest John Perevezentsev and clergy of the Diocese of Rybinsk concelebrating. The service was performed on a ship over the site where the convent was located.
The tradition of serving Liturgies above the flooded holy sites of Mologa and its surroundings is quite new. The first Divine Liturgy was celebrated in 2012.
Mologa. A view of the St. Athanasius Convent. Early 1900s.
The now flooded town of Mologa was situated thirty-two kilometers (about twenty miles) from Rybinsk and 120 kilometers (around seventy-four and a half miles) from Yaroslavl—at the confluence of the Mologa river with the Volga river. On September 14, 1935, the Council of People’s Commissars of USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) decreed that building of the Rybinsk and Uglich water-engineering systems commence. The residents were resettled, and by 1947 the territory of the town was completely flooded. The St. Athanasius Convent (whose main relic was the wonderworking Tikhvin icon of the Mother of God) as well as four churches were submerged.
In total around 800 villages and larger rural settlements were destroyed and flooded as a result of the building of the Rybinsk and Uglich hydrosystems and the filling of the reservoir with water. More than fifty churches and six monasteries were submerged to create the Rybinsk Reservoir; among them were: the St. Doropheus Monastery on the Yuga river, halfway between Mologa and Rybinsk; the large complex of the St. Athanasius Convent in Mologa founded in the fourteenth century; the Convent of St. John the Baptist at Leushino which stood between the towns of Cherepovets and Rybinsk near the Sheksna river; and the Monastery of St. Paisius and the Protection of the Mother of God which stood on the Volga river close to the town of Uglich.
