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The Convent ot the Intercession was founded in 1364 but nothing has survived from this early period. The pres­ent buildings date back to the first half of the sixteenth century and later. The convent is connected with a tragic story which explains how it rapidly acquired a large number of sumptuous new buildings.

The Moscow ruler Vassili III was plotting a gross violation of church law. He had decided to divorce his wife Solomonia from the rich Saburov boyar family on the grounds that she was incapable of bearing him children. He then proposed to banish her to a convent and marry again to secure himself an heir. These plans upset the feudal princes who were plotting to secure the throne of Muscovy relying on the fact that Vassili had no heirs. Vassili became the object of many dark ru­mours and vicious gossip. Contemporary records give highly conflicting, dramatic accounts of this shameful episode in the life of the tsars and describe Solomonia as a beautiful, vivacious and intelligent woman firmly opposed to her husband's plans.

Vassili was not to be deterred, however. Between 1510 and 1518 he sent rich gifts to the church authorities in Constantinople and Mount Athos in the hope of per­suading them to agree to his divorce and second mar­riage. During the same period he also endowed the Con­vent of the Intercession with gifts and many new build­ings. The new churches were dedicated to the Interces­sion of the Virgin Mary, the Annunciation, and the Con­ception of St. Anne indicating their connection with the sad story of Solomonia. The convent walls loomed omi­nously over this unfortunate lady long before her fate was finally decided. It appears that Vassili had already chosen a beautiful young Polish gentlewoman to be his new wife, Yelena Glinskaya, who came to Moscow in 1507. The business dragged on for many years until the Metropolitan of Moscow Daniil, a cunning, unscrupu­lous politician, finally sanctioned the divorce after a^;] long official "investigation" on the grounds that Solo­monia was unable to bear children. In 1525 she was made to take the veil in the Convent of the Nativity in Moscow. The story goes that she struggled hard, tearing off the nun's veil and screaming so loudly about being forced against her will and her husband's treachery that one of Vassili's favourite courtiers and accomplices, Ivan Shigonya-Podzhogin struck her with his whip. Vas­sili married Yelena Glinskaya and the unwilling nun, now Sister Sophia, was banished to the distant Convent of the Intercession which had long been prepared to hide her within its walls.

The episode became the subject of a sad folk song:

"Why is there such sorrow in Moscow?

Why doth the great bell toll so sadly?

The Tsar is grown angry with his wife

And hath banished her from his sight

To the distant town of Suzdal

To the far Convent of the Intercession .. . ."

We have already mentioned the possibility that the cathedral of the Monastery of the Deposition of the Robe was commissioned by the boyar Ivan Shigonya-Podzhogin. He may have wanted to atone for his sins by building a church in the monastery next to the Convent of the Intercession.

But the story does not end here. Rumours reached Moscow that Solomonia, or Sister Sophia as she now was, had given birth to a son called Georgi. This was immediately investigated and the child's life was in dan­ger. Legend has it that Solomonia saved her son by entrusting him to close friends and saying that the child had died. She is even supposed to have staged a mock burial. For a long time no attention was paid to this legend until in 1934 when the burial vault in the lower storey of the Cathedral of the Intercession was being removed, a small white tombstone dating back to the sixteenth century was found next to Solomonia's tomb. Beneath it archaeologists discovered a little wooden cof­fin containing a bundle of old rags - evidently the re­mains of a cleverly made doll dressed in a rich silk shirt and wrapped in swaddling clothes embroidered with pearls. Here this dark page in the history of the rulers of old Russia and the Convent of the Intercession ends. Not surprisingly it interested Vassili's successor, his son by Yelena Glinskaya, none other than Ivan the Terrible, who demanded that all the documents relating to the question of Solomonia's barrenness should be delivered to him. Nothing has been seen of them since.

The Convent of the Intercession was to play the role of a prison on many other occasions. Nearly all its nuns were ladies of royal or noble birth who were subse­quently buried in the cathedral or nearby. They included members of the Nagiye, Gorbatiye and Shuisky families. Meanwhile the convent continued to amass riches and land. By the end of the seventeenth century it possessed 7,427 serfs. In the turbulent times of the seventeenth-century uprisings by the townspeople and peasants the church tried to maintain its authority by creating new saints and holy relics. The Patriarch Joseph canonised Solomonia in 1650 and her tomb was proclaimed a miracle-working shrine which attracted the credulous populace and swelled the convent's coffers.

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