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Situated in the Ukranian quarter of the city, visitors will find the
dauntingly high walls, crenellated bell towers and brick cupolas of
the Ivanovsky Convent, founded in the 16th century as a depository
for unwanted wives and daughters and a prison for Moscow's
noblewomen. Amongst those detained within the convent's walls during
its long history were the notorious Countess Dariya Saltykova,
incarcerated for torturing and murdering 139 of her own serfs, and
the tragic Princess Tarakanova. The Princess, who became known as
Sister Inokeniya Dosieeya, was the illegitimate child of Empress
Elizabeth and Count Razumovsky. On being sent abroad to be educated,
a Polish adventuress emerged and tried to claim her identity and her
right to inherit the throne. The impostor was revealed and
imprisoned, but Empress Catherine the Great thought it best to lure
Tarakanova back to the country and confine her to a nunnery for the
good of Russia and her own line of inheritance. To this task she
entrusted her favorite lover, Count Orlov, who seduced the young
heiress aboard a ship before locking her in her cabin and ensuring
her return to Russia. Although one version of the story insists that
the unlucky princess was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress
and drowned during a flood, she was in fact brought to the Ivanovsky
Convent and confined there for 25 years until Catherine's death,
whereupon she had come to accept her fate and chose to stay.
During Soviet times the convent was abandoned and the complex
turned into a police training school. Today it has been returned to
the Orthodox Church and is slowly being restored with the aim of
turning it back eventually into a working convent. |
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