Passion Icon of the Mother of God
Kept 13 August — The meeting of the icon at the Tver gates of Moscow, 1641, Sixth Sunday of Pascha, the Sunday of the Blind Man — the day of the first miracles at Palitsa
The Passion Icon (Russian Strastnaya) is an image of the Hodegetria type in which two angels hover on either side of the Mother of God bearing the instruments of the Passion — the cross, the lance, the sponge and the reed — and the Christ Child, seeing them, turns his face away and takes his Mother's hand in both of his, one small sandal slipping from his foot. It is the image of the Child's foreknowledge of the Cross, and of the Mother's. The Russian icon that bears the name was painted at Nizhny Novgorod for a peasant woman of the village of Palitsa named Katherine, whose long affliction and healing are the first of its miracles; it was brought to Moscow on 13 August 1641 and met at the Tver gates, where a church and afterwards the great Passion (Strastnoy) Convent were built to house it. The convent gave its name to Strastnaya Square, and the icon's feast is kept on August 13.
Katherine of Palitsa
The account preserved with the icon is one of the most circumstantial of the Russian icon-narratives, and quite unsparing about its subject. Katherine, a peasant woman of the village of Palitsa in the Nizhny Novgorod land, was after her marriage afflicted with what the sources call possession — fits of violence and despair that lasted seven years and drove her more than once to attempt her own life. At the end of them she prayed to the Mother of God and vowed that if she were healed she would enter a convent.
She was healed. She did not keep the vow: she stayed in her house with her husband and children, and the years went by. When at last she remembered it, the affliction came back. The Mother of God appeared to her and asked her, Katherine, why hast thou not kept thy promise to enter a convent and serve my Son and God? — and, when two further apparitions were disregarded, she was struck down with her face drawn to one side and her body immovable.
Then Katherine confessed the whole matter, and was told in a vision to seek out an iconographer named Gregory at Nizhny Novgorod, who had painted an image of the Mother of God of the Hodegetria type, and to venerate it. She sold what she had and saved seven silver coins to adorn the icon; and when the adornment was finished and the moleben sung, she was restored — the first of the recorded miracles of the image, and the reason the icon left the painter's house at all.
From Palitsa to Moscow
The icon was set up at Palitsa, where the miracles multiplied and the fame of it spread until it reached the capital. In 1641 the Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich ordered it brought to Moscow. It was met on August 13 at the Tver gates of the city — the ceremonial sretenie, the "meeting", which is the event the feast actually commemorates — and a church was built on the spot to receive it.
In 1654 the Passion Convent (Strastnoy monastyr) was founded on Tverskaya Street around that church, and the wonderworking icon was its treasure and the source of its name. The convent stood there for nearly three centuries; the square before it was called Strastnaya Square, and the whole quarter took its name from the icon. The monastery was suppressed after the revolution and its buildings demolished in 1937; the square is now Pushkin Square, and the icon itself passed into the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery.
The subject
The Strastnaya type is not a Russian invention. It belongs to a family of Byzantine and Cretan images of the Mother of God with the instruments of the Passion, of which the best known in the West is the Cretan panel venerated in Rome as Our Lady of Perpetual Help — the same composition, the same two angels, the same turned head and slipping sandal. What the Russian tradition added was the particular history of the Palitsa icon and the Moscow feast of its meeting.
Feast and commemoration
The principal commemoration is August 13, the anniversary of the meeting of the icon at the Tver gates in 1641 — civil August 13 on the New Calendar, civil August 26 on the Old. It falls on the leavetaking of the Transfiguration and within the Dormition Fast (August 1–14).
A second commemoration is kept on the sixth Sunday of Pascha, the Sunday of the Blind Man, which is movable and belongs to the movable calendar rather than to any fixed day.
The observance is Russian; the icon is not in the Greek books, though the composition is Byzantine. It is prayed before for those afflicted in mind, for deliverance from despair and from the temptation to self-destruction, and for the keeping of vows.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
Today the faithful keep radiant festival, overshadowed by thy coming, O Mother of God; and gazing upon thy most pure image we cry with compunction: shelter us beneath the precious veil of thy protection, and deliver us from every ill, entreating thy Son, Christ our God, to save our souls.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Kontakion — Tone 8
Beholding the cross and the lance borne by the angels, the Child turned to thee and took thy hand, O Virgin; and thou didst hold him fast, knowing what was to come. Wherefore hold us also in the hour of our fear, and let us not be shaken.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Appointed readings
Epistle — Philippians 2:5–11
5Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: 6Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: 7But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: 8And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. 9Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: 10That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; 11And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Gospel — Luke 10:38–42; 11:27–28
38Now it came to pass, as they went, that he entered into a certain village: and a certain woman named Martha received him into her house. 39And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus’ feet, and heard his word. 40But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me. 41And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: 42But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her. 27And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked. 28But he said, Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.
Iconography
The composition is fixed and is read from the Child outwards. The Mother of God holds him on her left arm in the manner of the Hodegetria, but the calm of that type is broken: two angels approach from above on either side, each carrying the instruments of the Passion — on one side the cross with the sponge, on the other the lance — held not as trophies but as things shown; and the Child, catching sight of them, has turned his head sharply away and seized his Mother's right hand in both of his, so that his own hands are shown hanging from hers. His right sandal has come loose and dangles from the foot, the small realistic detail on which the whole pathos of the image turns.
The Mother of God does not look at the angels or at the Child but out at the viewer, with the grave frontal gaze of the Hodegetria, and there is no expression of distress in her face — the icon states foreknowledge, not grief. The angels are usually named in the field, Michael and Gabriel. The monograms МР ѲУ and ΙС ХС stand as always.
No pre-1900 reproduction of the Palitsa panel itself has been located in the public domain for this collection, and no image is stored with this entry.