7/08/2009

Zagorsk


















Atheistic communists closed the Lavra for 1919-46. In 1919 Sergievsky Posad got a town status and a new name of Sergiev to be later renamed into Zagorsk (1930) after Vladimir Zagorsky, a Moscow party secretary, assasinated with a bomb thrown by his political opponents. The site was so charged with history that even Stalin couldn't bring himself to raze it, though its monks were sent to labor camps after the Bolshevik revolution. Stalin even allowed the monastery to reopen after World War II as the spiritual center of the emasculated, state-monitored Orthodox Church of the Soviet era.

Posad's oldest churches stand SE of the Lavra, at the hill foot meeting tourists 1st. 

The churches of the Entry of Our Lady into the Temple and of St. Paraskeva, Martyr surnamed "Friday" replaced a wooden parish church of the Service settlement. The Entry Church (1547) was sponsored by a boyar Habarov, the Friday Church (1547) with a 17th-c. chapel over the St. Paraskeva well - by the Trinity Monastery.

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