The finding of the Kazan icon (Our Lady of Kazan)

Kazan was newly annexed, and Ivan IV was pushing to Christianise its conquered Muslim population. On 23 June 1579, the feast of St Agrippina, a fire broke out near the church of St Nicholas Tulsky. It destroyed most of the trading quarter. A later church calendar gives the date as 28 June. According to the Tale, non-Christians mocked the Orthodox after the fire.

The Tale calls Matrona the ten-year-old daughter of "a simple soldier skilled in military shooting." Later tradition names him as the musketeer Daniil Onuchin and gives her age as nine. In the days after the fire, the icon of the Mother of God came to her in a vision. "Not once," wrote Hermogenes. It showed her a place, and she told her mother, who paid no attention.

Then came the third vision. Midday. Matrona was napping. The icon appeared "in a terrible, fiery form, emitting most brilliant and very terrible fiery rays." She thought those rays would burn her. A voice threatened: "then I will appear in another street and in another city, and you will become ill." She fell to the ground as if dead and lay there for many hours.

Her mother went to the voevodas, the military governors. Then to Archbishop Jeremiah. Both dismissed her. 8 July 1579, the feast of St Procopius. At the burned house the mother dug with a spade and found nothing, and others joined in.

Then Matrona herself began to dig "at the place where the stove had formerly been." At a little more than two cubits, an icon appeared. On it was a worn sleeve of cherry-coloured cloth, and no earth clung to it. The image "shone wondrously with brightness, as though newly painted." The people there cried out: "Lady, save us!"

One of those present was Hermogenes, then priest of St Nicholas Gostiny church. He wept and venerated the icon. With the archbishop's blessing he carried it through the crowd. Archbishop Jeremiah, the clergy, the voevodas and a great multitude took it to St Nicholas Tulsky and on into the city. Joseph, blind for three years, recovered his sight, and Nikita, who had never seen light, was given sight.

Ivan IV ordered a church and a women's convent built on the site, the Kazan Bogoroditsky Monastery. Matrona and her mother took vows there, and tradition says Matrona became abbess under the name Mavra. Hermogenes became Metropolitan of Kazan and later Patriarch. In 1594 he wrote the Tale, the main account of the event, presenting himself as an eyewitness to the finding but not to the visions.

The original did not survive. On the night of 29 June 1904, the church robber Bartholomew Chaikin, known as "Stoyan," stole it for its jewelled cover. Police concluded the icon was cut up and burned in a stove. A copy kept at Fátima and later in the study of John Paul II was received in Kazan on 21 July 2005. In 2023 Patriarch Kirill presented an icon dated to 1580 as the original itself, though art historians said its authenticity was unconfirmed.

No source alleges the finding was staged. Church tradition holds that the icon had been buried by secret Orthodox believers under Tatar rule. On that reading the miracle lies in the visions and the icon's condition. In 2017 V. M. Kirillin found the Tale conventional in plot and language, close to the Tikhvin and other icon-finding tales, yet noted that it avoids exaggeration and mysticism. Critics add that it was written about 15 years after the event by a churchman whose career was tied to the icon.

The image became known as Our Lady of Kazan. Its feasts fall on 21 July and 4 November, the second now Russia's Day of National Unity.