Key Information: Tour Duration: 1
day(s) Group Size: 1
- 30
people Destination(s):Russia Specialty Categories:Cultural JourneyArcheology/History Season: January - December Airfare Included: No Tour Customizable: No Minimum Per Person Price: 100 US Dollar (USD) Maximum Per Person Price: 100 US Dollar (USD)
The Novodevichy (New Maidens) Convent was founded in 1524 in honor of the return of Smolensk to Russia in 1514 by Prince Vasily the third. It was built as a fortress at a curve of the Moskva River, and was known to have sheltered many ladies from the Russian royal families and boyar clans, who had been forced to take the veil, such as Sophia Alekseyevna (Peter the Great's sister), and his first wife Eudoxia Lopukhina.
New Maidens Cemetery is located right behind the convent and also attracts a lot of visitors because it is one of the most prestigious cemeteries in the city it was based in 1898, and called the New Cemetery. Here lie the bodies of some of Russia's most outstanding writers and poets such as Chekhov, Gogol, Mayakovsky and Bulgakov, also the famous art collectors Pavel and Sergei Tretyakov are buried there. Nikita Krushchev was given a famous memorial gravestone, crafted in black and white marble by the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny and symbolizing the ambiguity and contradictory nature of Krushchev's period in power new maidens convent was closed by the soviet government in 1922 and was used as a "Museum of Women's Emancipation" until its reopening in 1964 as a museum of New Maidens history Novodevichy Convent in winter.
