Case file · Apparition / miracle
Matrona finds the icon of Kazan
After a great fire in Kazan in 1579, the girl Matrona dreamed three times that the Virgin told her where her icon lay; on 8 July the icon was dug from the ashes of a burned house, and the priest who carried it, Yermolai, later became Patriarch Hermogenes.
1579 CE · 55.80, 49.11 · status: legend
The account
Hermogenes himself wrote the account. The Kazan icon became a symbol of the Russian state, credited with the liberation of Moscow from the Poles in 1612 and carried before armies in 1812. The original was stolen from a Kazan convent in 1904 and probably destroyed for its gold cover.
The sceptical view
The finding is described by an interested witness; the icon's miracles are matters of faith.