The Ababkovsky St. George and St. Nicholas Convent

Ababkovo Georgievsky Nikolaevsky Convent is a women's monastery on the right bank of the Oka near the village of Ababkovo in Pavlovsky District, Nizhny Novgorod Region, one of ten Nizhny Novgorod monasteries founded with the blessing of the venerable Seraphim of Sarov.^[1][13] The convent grew out of an almshouse for widows and unmarried women established around 1818 at the village cemetery's Church of St. George: in 1848 the almshouse became a community, in January 1859 it was raised to the status of a third-class cenobitic monastery, and by 1915 more than two hundred nuns lived there. In 1928 the monastery was closed, and both of its cathedrals were later blown up; since February 8, 1995, the convent has been undergoing revival, and a new cathedral is rising on the site of the destroyed Intercession Cathedral.^[1][2][8][9]

Name and Location

In church registers the convent is called the "Ababkovo Convent in the Name of St. Nicholas the Hierarch and St. George the Victorious Great Martyr": it is called Ababkovo after the neighboring village, and Nikolaevsky after its patron (ktitor), the Pavlovo merchant Nikolay Alekseevich Akifyev.^[1][2] The monastery itself reads the second half of the name differently: "in the name of St. George the Victorious Great Martyr and Nicholas the Slav, schemamonk."^[13]

In pre-revolutionary descriptions, the monastery was listed under Gorbatov Uyezd of Nizhny Novgorod Governorate — sixty-five versts from Nizhny Novgorod and fifteen from the district seat of Gorbatov.^[2] It stands not in Ababkovo itself but nearby, in the settlement of Molodyozhny (the monastery's address is Molodyozhny settlement, 25), which is why reference works give its location in two ways.^[11][14] The nearest towns are Pavlovo and Vorsma; three versts from its walls, on the Kishma River, the monastery operated a water-powered flour mill.^[2][14]

The monastery's postal address is 606143, Nizhny Novgorod Region, Pavlovsky District, selo of Ababkovo (a larger village); telephone (83171) 7-13-15.^[7][11][14] The site was chosen right by the water: the monastery stands between small lakes above the right bank of the Oka, and this scene — a lake, a secluded church, and the river beyond — determined its fate.^[2][10]

Lukia the Wanderer

The founder of the convent was Lukia Evdokimovna Maslennikova, the daughter of townspeople (meshchane) of Mologa, born in 1781.^[2][5] The monastic life had drawn her since youth, but her parents loved their daughter and did not want to let her go to a convent. So Lukia secretly left home, called herself Lukian, and entered the men's Valaam Monastery, where she labored for several years until it came out that she was a runaway. She spent a year in a prison in Petersburg without giving her name, until her father tracked her down and took her home.^[2]

She did not stay at home: together with a like-minded young woman named Natalia, she set out on a pilgrimage to the holy places of Russia. Descending from Akulovskaya Hill to the Oka near Ababkovo, the two wanderers stopped, struck by the view: in the distance, in complete seclusion, stood a church, and nearer, a village. The church turned out to be an ancient cemetery church, dedicated to the Great Martyr George the Victorious, built in 1733.^[2][4][6]

I think we have found what we have been seeking for so long!

The almshouse at St. George's Church

It was a Sunday, and the wanderers arrived at the very beginning of the liturgy. After the service, the local landowner Natalia Yakovlevna Prokofyeva, following the old custom, invited both of them to dine; in conversation Lukia revealed her wish to settle beside the secluded church, and Prokofyeva set up an almshouse there.^[2] Before beginning her new life, Lukia went to Sarov Hermitage: Saint Seraphim, together with the elders Nazarius and Hilarion, whom she knew from Valaam, gave her their blessing, and Hilarion tonsured her privately into the mantle with the name Lampadia.^[2][11]

Lampadia wore the male novice's habit — a black peasant chapan with a belt, a monastic cap instead of a headscarf, long hair like a novice's — and beneath her clothes, heavy chains, which the convent preserved.^[5] In summer she went to pray in the depths of the forest, and in winter and bad weather, in a small cave that people in Ababkovo remembered for many years after her death.^[2][5] According to monastic tradition, the Great Martyr George appeared to her three times in the forest, and at her request an icon of the saint was painted in the form in which he had appeared to the ascetic; this image was later venerated as miracle-working.^[4][11]

Lampadia died of fever on May 18, 1823, at the age of forty-two, and was buried by the Church of St. George. By that time twelve sisters were living in the almshouse: they wove, spun, and kept a vegetable garden. Ksenia Nikolayevna, a sister of the Zelenogorsk community, became their senior.^[1][2]

The first years were hard: the surrounding peasants were displeased that newcomers had taken their land, and robbers raided the cells, expecting to find wealth there. Ksenia went to Sarov for counsel and returned encouraged, while Prokofyeva secured two desyatinas of land for the sisters and deposited five thousand rubles in a bank on their behalf.^[2]

Mother Palladia and the Birth of the Community

In 1846, Ksenia, her health failing, summoned Evdokia to take her place — the daughter of the Mologa peasants Tit and Akilina Kruglov, called Evdokia Titova in church records.^[1][2][5] She spent five years in Ababkovo, then moved to the Arzamas St. Nicholas Monastery for a stricter monastic rule and received the ryassophore there with the name Palladia, returning as an experienced nun. Even before her return she had heard words from the Venerable Seraphim that she did not understand at the time and that frightened her, since she thought the elder was predicting a worldly life for her.^[5][2]

Palladia introduced into the almshouse the rule of the strict communal monasteries and the reading of the unceasing Psalter, taught the sisters monastic handicrafts, and obtained permission to collect funds for the renovation of the dilapidated Church of St. George, in which it had become dangerous to hold services. The number of sisters under her immediately grew to thirty.^[1][2] The convent's holdings grew through donors: Count Sheremetev gave one and a half desyatinas, and the merchant Nikolay Alekseevich Akifyev gave fifty desyatinas.^[1][2]

The convent remembered something special about the Akifyevs. The wealthy merchant liked to adorn churches; once his wife, Anna Vasilyevna, read to him an account from the life of the Great Martyr George — about the miraculous revival of a abandoned church of the saint in Asia Minor — and the two regretted that in their time no such derelict churches remained. When Mother Palladia soon came to them collecting funds for the Church of St. George in Ababkovo, and in their own native place at that, they took it as a sign.^[2]

Akifyev deposited twelve thousand silver rubles in a bank and gave the community more than a hundred desyatinas of arable land.^[2] Secured by this endowment, the almshouse received the right, by decree of the Most Holy Synod on December 19, 1848, to be called the Ababkovo Nikolaevskaya Communal Women's Community, and was taken under the patronage of the ecclesiastical and civil authorities.^[2][4] The Orthodox Encyclopedia dates the same decree to December 19, 1849.^[1]

Pray more to God and you will have little children; and there will be many children, you must become a Sarah

Saint George himself has come to us

Churches and Stone Construction

The community laid down its first church — dedicated to the Intercession of the Most Holy Mother of God, with side chapels of the Great Martyr George the Victorious and the Martyr Nicholas the Soldier, the heavenly patron of the donor — on June 22, 1849, and completed its construction in 1851. It was consecrated in parts: the chapel of George on November 22, 1853, the main altar on July 25, 1854, and the chapel of Nicholas on July 26.^[1][2] The church was made of wood; the description of the Nizhny Novgorod Metropolia and the monastery chronicle call it stone.^[1][2][4][8] The iconostasis was carved and gilded, the walls were plastered and painted, and a choir loft was built against the west wall; the low but elegant bell tower held eight bells, the first of which weighed one hundred forty-seven poods.^[2]

In those same years, stone buildings went up. In 1852, a hospital building was erected with a house church dedicated to the icon of the Mother of God "Joy of All Who Sorrow," along with cells, a refectory, a prosphora bakery, and a psalmody house; in 1852–1855, with funds from Akifyev, the grounds were enclosed by a stone wall with four towers at the corners, and outside the wall a two-story house for the clergy and a two-story house for receiving pilgrims were built.^[1][2] Soon after the consecration of the Intercession Church, Nikolay Akifyev died, and his widow, Anna Vasilyevna, took over the care of the almshouse.^[2][4]

The Summer Trinity Cathedral was laid down on July 11, 1865, according to a design that had received the highest approval and had been reviewed by the Department of Projects and Estimates of the Main Directorate of Ways of Communication and Public Buildings in St. Petersburg. The following year the convent burned down — all of its service buildings were lost — and work came to a halt for almost twenty years: first, over two years, the fire-damaged buildings were rebuilt, and only then did work return to the cathedral.^[2][4] The two-story, five-domed, three-altar church was completed in 1886: on June 26 (according to the convent chronicle, June 28) the right side chapel, in honor of the Tikhvin Icon of the Mother of God, was consecrated, and on June 29 the main altar of the Life-Giving Trinity and the left side chapel were consecrated. S. V. Baruzdina and the convent chronicle call the left side chapel the Chapel of St. Nicholas, while the Orthodox Encyclopedia calls it the Chapel of St. John the Forerunner.^[1][2][4] The interior finishing, the gilded iconostasis, and the wall paintings were paid for by the Moscow honorary citizen and merchant Ivan Vasilyevich Zalogin.^[4]

In 1897 a wealthy St. Petersburg merchant's wife, Pelageya Fyodorovna Maksimova, entered the convent to live there and took monastic vows. With funds from Ioann and Pelageya Maksimov, in 1900 — on the site of the wooden Pokrovskaya (Intercession) Church, which had been dismantled because of its dilapidated state — a stone winter church with four altars and a bell tower was laid down, to a design by the civil engineer Anatoly Ivanovich Shmakov; it was painted by Konstantin Aleksandrovich Pershin, a peasant from the village of Palekh.^[2][4] The main altar was consecrated in 1903. The cathedral was heated by air-heating stoves and a water heating system; a burial crypt was built in the undercroft, where the remains of the church's founders, the Maksimovs, were laid to rest — the crypt's side chapel in the name of All Saints was consecrated on September 29, 1904.^[2][4]

Sources disagree on the number of domes on the Pokrovsky Cathedral: the annual report of Abbess Antonia for 1903 and the convent chronicle speak of eleven domes, S. V. Baruzdina and the Orthodox Encyclopedia of nine, and the description from the Nizhny Novgorod Metropolia of a five-domed chetverik (cube-shaped main volume) in the pseudo-Russian style, richly decorated in the spirit of seventeenth-century architecture, with lower galleries around it and a low tented-roof bell tower.^{[1][2][4][5][8]}

The ensemble was completed by a two-story stone refectory building: it was laid down in 1904 but finished only in 1914.^[2] By 1904, there were nine residential buildings inside the enclosure and seven more outside it; the enclosure was pierced by three gateways.^[4]

On September 22 of the current year, a newly built stone church with four altars and eleven domes was consecrated. It was erected at the expense of Maximova, a hereditary Honorary Citizen of Saint Petersburg. The main altar of this church was consecrated in the name of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos

The monastery at the beginning of the 20th century

The register of the monastery, compiled by Abbess Rakhil for the year 1911, lists within the stone enclosure two stone churches — the Trinity and the Intercession churches, a stone hospital building with a domestic Church of Our Lady of Sorrows, a stone chapel, three stone two-story buildings, four wooden two-story buildings, one semi-stone two-story building, a wooden cell, three icehouses, three bathhouses, and several outbuildings. Outside the enclosure stood a wooden chapel, two priests' houses, two guesthouses, a one-story wooden building housing the "Maximovskaya" parish school, a workers' house, and the house of benefactor V. I. Zheltikov.^[1][2]

The monastery's landholdings amounted to 689.5 desyatinas and 66 sazhens.^[1][2] The monastery maintained metochions in four locations: in Nizhny Novgorod on Zelensky Descent near the Polish Catholic church — a semi-stone house with a stone chapel; at the Sormovo factories in Sormovo sloboda on Teatralnaya Street; in Gorbatov on Nizhegorodskaya Street; and in Pavlovo on Pochtovaya Street, where prosphora were baked for local churches. The prosphora bakeries of the metochions provided the monastery with its main income.^[2][5]

Works of mercy were the monastery's principal mission: an almshouse, care for the sick and infirm, a hospital, a pilgrims' shelter, and a school.^[15] The parish school for girls of the selo of Ababkovo and the monastic orphanage opened on October 17, 1894; at first twenty-four pupils studied there, the first graduating class completed its studies on May 1, 1897, and by 1917 thirteen boys and ten girls were enrolled. In terms of amenities and equipment, it was the finest school in the district.^[4][5]

The sisters were famed for their needlework — satin-stitch embroidery, belt weaving, and "gold embroidery." In January 1904, works by the Ababkovo embroiderers, together with items from other Nizhny Novgorod convents, were sent to Saint Petersburg for the first All-Russian Exhibition of Monastic Works, and the convent received a silver medal from the exhibition committee.^[1][2][4] The convent ran a linen-sewing workshop and an icon-painting workshop, its own bakery, a kvass brewery, and horse and cattle yards.^[1][4]

The chief holy relic remained the icon of the Great Martyr George, bequeathed to the sisters by the founding abbess. According to oral tradition, the icon was painted by a Pavlovo icon painter of the Vlasov family, and the silver-gilt oklad was donated by Anna Akifyeva; in 1881, to adorn the icon, Bishop Jeremiah (Solovyov) gave the convent an episcopal panagia in memory of his family.^[4] The Pokrovskaya Church also housed fragments of the Lord's robe and Cross, and relics of the Hieromartyr Haralampus and the Great Martyr George.^[2]

Abbesses

Between 1906 and 1911, the convent changed abbesses four times. The aged hegumena Antonia was retired from her post, her successor Smaragda left after a year because of illness, Magdalina, sent from the Kiev Pokrovsky Convent, returned there after four years — and until the convent was closed it was headed by the treasurer Rachel.^[5]

Hegumena Magdalina had a medical education: she set up a medicine cabinet and a household first-aid kit at the hospital and personally looked after the sick sisters. Her first report, for 1908, betrays the bewilderment of a new abbess faced with a large and not wealthy establishment, but the following ones show an already confident mistress of the house, who repairs, builds, and remodels.^[5]

"The modest income of the convent, to our deepest regret, does not allow us even to think of finishing the refectory building until the debt owed by the monastery is paid off"

Closure

In early 1918, the entire monastery estate was taken into account by the Pavlovo Land Department, but the convent continued to function: its sisters — there were more than a hundred and sixty of them — registered an agricultural artel.^[1][4] In the spring of 1919, a sovkhoz (state farm) was created on the monastery's lands, and twenty-four novices transferred to it; the land, equipment, part of the livestock, and some of the residential buildings were confiscated. The monastery retained a house, the horse and cattle yards, and a threshing barn, while the Pavlovo District Administration leased the meadows to it.^[1][4]

In 1922, residents of Ababkovo, Bolshaya Tarka, and the surrounding villages — three hundred and thirteen people — formed a religious community at the monastery, and two churches and the domestic Church of the Sorrowful Mother, along with its liturgical utensils, were transferred to it. In 1925, thirty-seven nuns and fifty novices lived in the convent; most of the novices worked at the sovkhoz.^[1]

By resolution of the presidium of the Pavlovo District Executive Committee, the monastery and the community were closed: its property was ordered to be sold off through the finance department, its buildings handed over to the land administration for use as agitation posts, and its residents driven out. The Orthodox Encyclopedia dates the resolution to April 19, 1928, while the monastery chronicle gives April 13.^[1][4] In August 1928, seven monastery buildings and the land were given to the rest home of the Pavlovo insurance fund.^[1] The Trinity and Intercession churches were blown up in the 1930s; the description by the Nizhny Novgorod Metropolia places the destruction of the Intercession Cathedral in 1930.^[1][8] The Metropolia's reference book gives 1923 as the year of closure.^[7]

Military Topographic School

From October 1941 to April 1945, the surviving monastic cell buildings housed the Leningrad Military Topographic School. Over those years it trained 1,200 young officers and 347 students in officer advanced-training courses.^[12] On February 8, 1945, the school returned to Leningrad; the same day is observed in Russia as Military Topographer's Day.^[9]

After the war, the monastery buildings held a school for Komsomol activists, a school for film projectionists, and a women's vocational school for minors, and later a children's camp.^[4][14]

The monastery's link with the topographers was never severed. On February 8, 2020, when the monastery marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of its revival, veteran topographers came to the celebration; at that time two graduates of the school from the Ababkovo years were still living in Ivanovo and St. Petersburg — both were nearly a hundred years old.^[9] The pilgrimage trips of the Ivanovo Regional Organization of Veterans of the Military Topographic Service had become a ten-year tradition by 2024: that year the veterans renewed the memorial plaque and presented the monastery with an Iverskaya icon, and at the memorial to the participants of the Great Patriotic War in Ababkovo and at the village cemetery they held memorial services for the dead.^[12]

Revival from 1995

On February 8, 1995, documents were signed returning the surviving buildings to the Russian Orthodox Church; the revival began with the blessing of Metropolitan Nikolay (Kutepov) of Nizhny Novgorod and Arzamas, and Nun Irina (Kurbatova) was appointed abbess.^[1][9][14] On July 6, 1995, the few surviving buildings were handed over to the Nizhny Novgorod Diocese.^[1] The return of the buildings was pursued by the oldest Pavlovo pastor, Archpriest Aleksandr Kalev.^[4]

The devastated convent greeted its first nuns with a leaking roof, collapsing ceilings, empty window and door openings, and no running water or sewage system.^[4] By the beginning of 2000, the monastery had eight sisters; services were held in the only surviving and repaired house church, the Church of the Sorrowful Mother.^[1] On January 31, 2001, Metropolitan Nikolay (Kutepov) consecrated this church in the abbess's building.^[6][11]

In February 2002, sisters from the Diveevo convent, led by the nun Nikona (Zhelyakova), arrived in Ababkovo; in 2004 the Synod confirmed her as abbess, and she was later elevated to the rank of hegumeness.^[4][11] On May 14, 2005, Bishop (now Metropolitan) George of Nizhny Novgorod and Arzamas laid the first stone of the Cathedral of the Intercession, which is being rebuilt, and consecrated the first two cells of the children's building.^[4][8]

The Church of the Intercession is being restored in the forms of the building as it stood in the 1900s. In September 2023, consecrated crosses and domes were raised onto the cathedral; by spring 2024, workers were finishing the plastering of the walls and materials for the floors had been purchased, and on April 30, 2024, Metropolitan George approved the design of the iconostasis.^[8] The progress of the work is reviewed at meetings held by the head of the metropolitanate: the meeting of January 8, 2025, was attended by the abbess, Father Antony Arakin, dean of the Pavlovo district, and representatives of the contracting organizations.^[16] The convent collects donations to complete the construction.^[13]

In August 2024, the monastery was visited by members of the Nizhny Novgorod and Moscow branches of the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society, who were studying archival materials on the history of the convents founded with the blessing of St. Seraphim of Sarov; Hegumeness Nikona was presented with the medal "Savior of the Fatherland Kuzma Minin" for her work in reviving the monastery.^[10]

The convent today

The convent belongs to the Vyksa Diocese of the Nizhny Novgorod Metropolia; the abbess is Hegumeness Nikona (Zhelyakova).^[7][11] Because the convent was founded with the blessing of St. Seraphim, it adopted as its basis the rule of the Seraphim-Diveevo Convent: the morning rule at six o'clock, the Divine Liturgy, a molieben or panikhida, obediences (assigned work), the evening service at five in the afternoon, and the reading of the Psalter by day and during the night hours. Every day the sisters walk around the convent in a procession of the cross, reciting "Rejoice, O Virgin Theotokos" one hundred and fifty times.^[11]

The convent continued the tradition of mercy by opening a shelter. The first two cells of the children's building were consecrated on May 14, 2005, and on April 29, 2007, a separate children's building was opened — the former Smetanin prosphora bakery — where twelve girls and a boy lived.^[6][11] Today a foster family under guardianship lives at the convent: seven girls and a boy; five of the wards have already graduated, and some have started families of their own.^[11] The children study with tutors, attend music school, and travel to the sea every year.^[6][11] The convent also has an auxiliary farm with its own cheese dairy.^[10]

A few kilometers from the convent flows the Spassky Klyuchik — a spring where, according to tradition, an image of the Savior Not Made by Hands appeared to a pious peasant. After long years of neglect, a stone chapel was built over the spring with funds from V. N. Volkov, director of the Pavlovo printing house, and the spring was put in order; the sisters now care for it, and at the end of May a procession of the cross, with the participation of the children, goes there.^[6][11] Nearby rises a tall, steep hill, which, by a pious custom, is walked around three times in prayer.^[11]

Day trips run by the diocesan pilgrimage center link Ababkovo with the Holy Trinity Ostrovoezersky Monastery on an island in Lake Vorsma in Vorsma.^[15] Pilgrims traveling independently reach the monastery by bus No. 103 from Pavlovo (from Sennaya Street) or by suburban train to the Ababkovo platform, and then on foot across the railway crossing.^[13][14] Pilgrims are asked to give advance notice of their arrival; for those who find it hard to climb the stairs, the monastery has means of transport.^[13]

Protected status

By decision of the Nizhny Novgorod Regional Council of People's Deputies of October 20, 1992, No. 299-M, all places of worship in the Region built before 1925 were declared historical and cultural heritage sites as a single typological group — together with monastic cells, outbuildings, and clergy houses — and were thereby removed from privatization. At that time, about two hundred places of worship were on the state register, out of more than seven hundred surviving.^[3]

By resolution of the Legislative Assembly of Nizhny Novgorod Region of May 30, 1995, No. 64, the monastery complexes of the Bogorodsky, Vachsky, and Pavlovsky Districts, including the architectural complex of the Ababkovo St. Nicholas–St. George Monastery of the 19th and early 20th centuries, were declared monuments of history and culture of regional significance, and their territories were designated lands of historical and cultural purpose.^[3] The same act granted the status of lands of historical and cultural purpose to the island in Lake Vorsma with the ruins of the Ostrovoezersky Trinity Monastery, and placed under protection the Ambrosiev Dudin and Oransky Bogoroditsky monasteries; two years earlier, the ensemble of the Exaltation of the Cross Monastery in Nizhny Novgorod had been protected, and in 1994 the Vyksa Iveron monastery.^[3]

For complex sites, since 1994 the Region has established the boundaries of territories and individual regimes of use: the phased transfer of buildings to church communities, restoration of monuments, demolition or reconstruction of structures that clash with the surroundings, archaeological supervision during earthworks, a ban on construction that spoils the historic appearance of the ensemble, and a ban on laying utilities through monastery necropolises.^[3] The Ababkovo complex was among the first to be transferred to monastic communities, together with the Makaryev Zheltovodsky, the Nizhny Novgorod Pechersky, and the Oransky Bogoroditsky monasteries.^[3]

Sources

1. pravenc.ru — Orthodox Encyclopedia (archive)
2. museum-murom.ru — Murom Museum of History and Art — proceedings of the "Uvarov Readings — III" conference (archive)
3. museum-murom.ru — Murom Museum of History and Art — proceedings of the "Uvarov Readings — III" conference (archive)
4. web.archive.org — Official website of the Ababkovo Monastery, web archive copy — Brief chronicle of the monastery (archive)
5. web.archive.org — Official website of the Ababkovo Monastery, web archive copy — Ascetic women: biographies of the abbesses (archive)
6. web.archive.org — Official website of the Ababkovo Monastery, web archive copy — About the monastery: general information (archive)
7. nne.ru — Nizhny Novgorod Metropolis — official website — Ababkovo Nikolsky Georgievsky Convent (archive)
8. nne.ru — Nizhny Novgorod Metropolis — Archbishop George approved the iconostasis design for the Pokrovsky Cathedral of the Ababkovo Monastery, now being restored (archive)
9. nne.ru — Nizhny Novgorod Metropolis — On the 25th anniversary of the start of the Ababkovo Monastery's revival, veteran topographers visited the convent (archive)
10. nne.ru — Nizhny Novgorod Metropolis — Representatives of the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society visited the Ababkovo Convent (archive)
11. monasterium.ru — "Monastyrsky Vestnik" — catalog of the Synodal Department for Monasteries and Monasticism — Ababkovo Nikolsky Georgievsky Convent (archive)
12. vyksa-eparhia.ru — Vyksa Diocese — Veterans' visit to the Ababkovo Monastery: a ten-year tradition of veterans of the military topographic service (archive)
13. ababkovo.ru — Official website of the Ababkovo Nikolsky Georgievsky Convent — Ababkovo Nikolsky Georgievsky Convent (archive)
14. autotravel-nn.ru — Auto Trips Around Nizhny Novgorod Region — a local-history guide — The Ababkovo Convent near the selo of Ababkovo in Pavlovsky District (archive)
15. palomnik.nne.ru — Pilgrimage Center of the Nizhny Novgorod Diocese — Ababkovo and Ostrovoezersky Monasteries (archive)
16. nne.ru — Nizhny Novgorod Metropolis — The head of the Nizhny Novgorod Metropolis held a meeting on the development of the Ababkovo Nikolsky Georgievsky Monastery (archive)