Sviyazhsk St John the Baptist Monastery

The convent was founded in the late sixteenth century at the church of the Nativity, but took its present shape after the fire of 1795, when it received the buildings of the closed men's Holy Trinity monastery. That monastery had been founded together with the town in 1551, and its monks came from the Trinity–St Sergius monastery near Moscow, patron of the new fortress. Its chief pearl is the wooden Trinity church, assembled in 1551 from log frames floated up the Volga when Sviyazhsk was being laid out: the oldest wooden building on the Volga. Beside it stands the St Sergius church of 1604 with chapels honouring Sergius of Radonezh and his disciple Nikon, while the architectural dominant is the large neo-Byzantine cathedral of the icon 'Joy of All Who Sorrow', built in 1898–1906 by the architect Fyodor Malinovsky. By the early twentieth century up to four hundred nuns lived here — the second-largest convent in the eparchy. Closed in 1919, the monastery served for decades as a museum: the ancient iconostasis of the Trinity church went to the State Fine Arts Museum of Tatarstan, and the church itself was restored in 1959. Today the community is a dependency of the neighbouring Assumption monastery.