Svoboda: a monastery town built around a healing spring in Kursk Oblast

The Root Hermitage (Korennaya Pustyn). Photo: Sergey Sebelev, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Svoboda is a very small town in Kursk Oblast, 30 km northeast of the provincial capital, Kursk. Wikivoyage's guide calls the Kursk Root Hermitage ("Korennaya Pustyn") here one of the most famous monasteries of the Black Earth region. For centuries a fair held at its walls was among the largest trading events in the Russian Empire.

A legend and a spring

According to legend, hunters from Rylsk found the icon of the Theotokos of Kursk, also called the Kursk Root Icon, in the roots of a tree deep in the woods during the Tatar-Mongol invasion. A healing spring is said to have gushed up where it lay, and the hunters built the first wooden chapel over it in 1295. The monastery was founded on the spot in 1597 by order of Tsar Feodor I. A stone church later replaced the chapel, and the spring still flows through it.

The hermitage was largely destroyed in the Time of Troubles and despoiled by Crimean Tatars, and it received its present layout only at the end of the 18th century. The guide adds that the icon is of the "Our Lady of the Sign" type, in which the Virgin Mary faces the viewer with her hands raised and the child Jesus shown within a round halo on her breast.

Other legends gather around the icon. One says that when the icon was carried away to a church in Rylsk, it vanished and reappeared at the spring until the people of Rylsk gave in and settled for pilgrimages. Another says raiders slashed it in half and that it became whole again when a priest brought the halves together. The guide also recounts that in 1898 anarchists set off a time bomb in the chapel. It shattered the windows, blew off the iron door and split the marble altar, yet left the icon and its glass case untouched.

The fair, the village and the war

From 1708 the Kursk Korenskaya ("Root") Fair was held at the monastery's walls, and by 1824 it was the third largest in the Russian Empire, after the Makaryevskaya fair at Nizhny Novgorod and the Irbitskaya fair. It followed the annual procession of the icon from Kursk, which drew thousands of pilgrims and is shown in one of the best-known 19th-century Russian paintings, Ilya Repin's procession in the Kursk province, now in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

Ilya Repin, Religious Procession in Kursk Governorate. Public domain.

A small village grew around the monastery in the 18th century and became an official settlement in 1886, when the Korennaya Pustyn station opened on the Moscow-Kursk railway. After the Russian Revolution the station and village were renamed Svoboda, literally "freedom". In 1943, during the Battle of Kursk, the headquarters of the Red Army's Central Front was set up here under K. K. Rokossovsky.

Where the icon went

The original is not in Svoboda. In October 1919 White Russian troops took it out of Russia to keep it from the communists. The guide says it was housed for a time in Belgrade and moved west through Europe, then found a long-term home at the Hermitage of Our Lady of Kursk in Mahopac, New York. Today it is kept at the Cathedral of the Theotokos of the Sign on Manhattan's Upper East Side, and it travels often, including to Svoboda for the feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos.

What to see

The bell tower over the Sacred Gates. Photo: Sergey Sebelev, CC BY-SA 4.0.

• Holy Gate and bell tower. The gate dates from 1708 and has restored frescoes. The bell tower was built in the second half of the 19th century; only its lower tier survived the Soviet era, and the upper tier was rebuilt in the early 2000s.
• Cathedral of the Nativity. The cathedral has stood in its present crossed-dome form since 1860 on the site of the 1295 chapel. The monastery was closed in 1924 and the cathedral destroyed; today's church stands on the surviving foundation. A nearby observation deck looks over the Tuskar river valley.
• Church of the Life-Giving Spring. Built in 1713 at the expense of Field Marshal Boris Sheremetyev to commemorate Russian victories, it stands at the lower tier by the river on the site of the spring, and stays cool in summer. The guide singles out its altar of faience and porcelain, made of materials resistant to cold and damp. A gallery added in 1835 links it to the monastery square.
• Springs. The main wellspring is decorated in the style of elm roots, with baths beside it and an open spot to swim in the shallow river, about waist deep. Smaller wellsprings with wooden chapels line the bank, and visitors bring containers to take the water home.
• Monuments. A 2003 fountain sculpture by Vyacheslav Klykov shows the moment the icon was found. A 1998 monument honours Saint Seraphim of Sarov, born in Kursk. The "Reunion" monument of 2015 marks the end of the split in the Russian Orthodox Church, which the guide dates to 2007.

The Church of the Life-Giving Spring and the Tuskar River. Photo: Sergey Sebelev, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Fair, procession and museums

The Kursk Korenskaya Fair was revived in 2001. It lasts several days with shows, workshops, local food and handicrafts, and ends with a concert. The annual procession is held on the ninth Friday after Easter and follows a route of about 30 km. A branch of the Kursk Regional Museum of Local Lore at the monastery covers the monastery, the icon and the fair, and another museum recreates Rokossovsky's command post of 1943, including his foxhole.

Weekends and religious holidays are crowded, and the guide advises coming before noon. Svoboda is so small that no point in it lies more than 2 km from another, and it has no transit system.

Getting there and nearby

Kursk's airport is 33 km away and has several flights a day from Moscow. Minibuses leave Kursk for Svoboda every half hour, and the guide warns that the last one back leaves Svoboda early, at 19:00. By car, the guide says the 530 km trip from the Moscow Ring Road takes about six hours on the M2 highway.

The A. A. Fet Estate. Photo: Aleksandra057, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, the Fet Estate on the Tuskar River was bought in 1877 by A. A. Fet, whom the guide calls widely regarded as Russia's greatest lyric poet. His original furniture was not preserved, so the interior is rebuilt from photographs. A Nightingale Night festival of poetry readings and music is held in the last ten days of May, and the Fet Readings on the first Sunday of July. The five-domed Church of Ioakim and Anna, built in 1864, stands where legend says a priest rejoined the two halves of the icon.

Sources

• Photographs from the Wikivoyage page: Sergey Sebelev (CC BY-SA 4.0), Aleksandra057 (CC BY-SA 4.0) and Ilya Repin's painting (public domain).
• Wikivoyage contributors, "Svoboda" (https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Svoboda), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changed here: rewritten as an overview, with listings, phone numbers, prices and opening hours left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.