Matrona

Saint Matrona of Moscow, in the world Matrona Dmitrievna Nikonova, was born in 1881 in the village of Sebino in the Tula Governorate of the Russian Empire, the daughter of the peasants Dmitry and Natalia Nikonov. Traditional accounts used in her later Church biography state that she was born blind, with eyelids closed over empty sockets, and that a raised cross-shaped mark was visible on her chest. She was one of several children in a poor rural household. Her parents at first considered placing the disabled infant in an orphanage, but according to the same tradition her mother was dissuaded by a dream and kept the child at home. From early childhood she was described as unusually prayerful. By about the age of seven or eight, people from Sebino and neighboring villages were bringing the afflicted to her, and she acquired a local reputation for consolation, counsel, and healings attributed to her prayers.

In adolescence she lost the use of her legs and remained unable to walk for the rest of her life. Despite blindness and paralysis, narratives of her youth describe journeys with a pious benefactress to major Russian shrines, including the Kiev Pechersk Lavra and the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. A later pious tradition claims a meeting with Saint John of Kronstadt, who is said to have recognized her spiritual gifts; that episode, like many anecdotal details in her life, is known only from later oral reports and cannot be independently confirmed from contemporary documents. After the Revolution of 1917 the Nikonov household was affected by confiscations and social upheaval. From 1925 Matrona lived principally in Moscow, moving from apartment to apartment among relatives and acquaintances. She did not enter a monastery and belonged to no religious order. Living as a lay ascetic under Soviet anti-religious policy, she received visitors who sought prayer and advice. Those who later gave testimony described her as warning of coming war, urging people to remain in the Orthodox Church, and encouraging confession and Holy Communion. She was not the subject of a widely documented political trial, but the frequent changes of address in the 1930s and 1940s are explained in the hagiography as precautions against arrest.

Matrona died in Moscow on 2 May 1952 and was buried at the Danilov Cemetery. In March 1998 her remains were exhumed and translated to the Convent of the Theotokos of the Intercession (Pokrovsky Monastery) in Moscow, which has since been the principal center of her cult and the resting place of her relics. The Moscow diocese glorified her as a locally venerated saint in 1999. In 2004 the Bishops' Council of the Russian Orthodox Church added her to the general calendar of saints, during the patriarchate of Alexy II. In the Russian Orthodox liturgical calendar she is commemorated on 2 May (the day of her repose), 8 March (the uncovering of her relics), and 22 November (the day of her birth). She is popularly invoked for the healing of the sick and of the blind and is closely associated with the city of Moscow, where her shrine draws large numbers of pilgrims.

Much of what is repeated about her inner life and miracles rests on recollections gathered decades after 1952 and on a hagiographical Life that mixes documented circumstance with pious tradition. Historians therefore treat many miracle stories and precise anecdotal details with caution. The outline of her birth in Sebino, her congenital blindness and later paralysis, her years in Moscow as a lay ascetic, her death in 1952, the 1998 translation of her relics, and her subsequent ecclesiastical glorification is, however, firmly established, and she has become one of the most widely venerated saints of twentieth-century Russia.