Celebration: March 16, December 10
In 1848, there was a threat of cholera in Moscow. In those difficult times, a terrible illness did not spare the Zamoskvoretsky merchant, elder Herodion Vorobyov, a sixty-year-old believer who came to the Catherine Church on Ordynka. The disease seized him and forced him to lie in bed. During his illness, he had a supernatural dream. In the dream, he imagined that he was in the Chrysostom monastery near the porch, where it was as if a monk and a novice were preparing for some consecrated ceremony. But the most amazing thing happened when he saw the image of the “Sign” of the Virgin on the wall and approached it to worship. On the icon of the Mother of God, the Infant smiled, and the Holy Virgin said the name of Herodion and handed him a crystal vessel. When Herodion awoke from this dream, he was relieved, and soon his illness receded completely. The holy healed man, as a sign of gratitude, went on February 17 to the Zlatoust Monastery, where he had not visited for thirty years. There, in the monastery, he found the icon of the “Sign” of the Mother of God above the arch of the porch of the Trinity Church. He recognized the icon as the one he had seen in his dream. On March 3, at his request, the icon was removed from the arch and brought to the Trinity Church. Before it, a moleben with water consecration was performed and the akathist to the Mother of God was read. Later, the icon was placed on a lectern in the chapel of St. Innocent of Irkutsk. A grateful merchant decorated the icon with a precious robe, and a woman who was healed by the icon created a copy and placed it in the Trinity Church, where the original miracle-working icon was located, which was transferred to the cathedral monastery church in the name of St. John Chrysostom in 1865. The monastery chronicle for 1848 describes eight miraculous healings that occurred thanks to this icon. One of them is connected with the wife of Major General Ekaterina Alexandrovna Kaplya. She suffered for several years from a nervous breakdown, accompanied by heart attacks and unbearable abdominal pain. She was literally speechless with pain and couldn’t get help from the best doctors. In desperation, she came to the Chrysostom Monastery and served a moleben in front of the icon of the” Sign ” of the Mother of God. Touching the icon brought relief, and the woman began to recover until she was completely recovered. The icon of the “Sign” of the Virgin is written on a lime board and has a size of 12 vershkov in height and 10 in width. Next to the image of the Mother of God, the icon also depicts St. Nicholas the Wonderworker and St. John, Archbishop of Novgorod. In the Zlatoust Monastery, prayer chants are held daily in front of this icon, and every Friday the Akathist to the Most Holy Theotokos is read here. Thus, the icon of the Sign of the Mother of God in the Chrysostom Monastery has become a place of miraculous healings and a symbol of hope and faith for many believers. This reminds us of the importance of spiritual communion and the protection that the Mother of God provides to her children.
