March 13
Devpeteruv Mother of God, Batyushkovo, Dmitrov, Moscow, Russia
The Devpeteruv Mother of God is a Tenderness image, showing Mother and Child cheek to cheek, as in the icon of Our Lady of Vladimir. Tradition holds this icon to have appeared miraculously on February 29, 1392 (March 13 in the modern calendar), but there is no information available about its early history or the origin of its name. The earliest written record of a Devpeteruv Mother of God places the 12" image in the stone Church of St. Nicholas built in 1666 in Batyushkovo, a village 35 miles from Moscow. In the 1930s, attackers killed the watchman and stole the icon in its jeweled sheath. The image was found in the mud nearby, stripped of ornament. The priest returned the picture to a place of honor in the church. But in 1939, the Soviet regime turned the church in Batyushkovo into a cow barn for a collective farm, where its icons were cut up and burned. The building, restored with blue onion domes, returned to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1997. At the request of a parishioner in thanks for answered prayers, iconographer V. Kharlamov wrote a new Devpeteruv Mother of God icon, placed on the northern pillar in St. Nicholas Church in 1999. In 2001, a boy named Vitali came out of a coma after his mother prayed before the icon. This miracle was depicted with 16 others around the edges of another Devpeteruv image which iconographer O. Gundeevoy wrote in 2002, now on the left side of the iconostasis in the church. In 1685, St. Pitirim took a copy of the Devpeteruvskaya to Tambov, 300 miles southeast of Moscow, when appointed as bishop there. Although the Devpeteruv icon's feast day is February 28-29 / March 13, the Eparchy of Tambov celebrates the wonderworking Devpeteruv-Tambov icon on St. Pitirim's day, July 28 / August 10.Sources include:
 | The Moscow Eparchy's website, "Празднование Девпетерувской Иконе," Дмитровское Благочиние - Московская епархия, www.dmitrovhram.ru/2007/prazdnovanie-devpeteryvskoi-ikone-presvyatoi-bogorodicy.html (information and image of the 2002 Batyushkovo icon) |
Also commemorated this date:
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Immaculate Conception, Georgetown, Guyana. Cathedral blessed, 1921. |