The Desyatinny Monastery () is an inactive monastery or convent in Veliky Novgorod (Russia), one of eight ancient monasteries of Novgorod Republic.
The Desyatinny Monastery now has a regular square-shaped perimeter. The monastery's complex was developed over a lengthy period and now includes objects constructed in periods from the 14th to the 20th centuries. It was finally completed at the beginning of the 20th century but was closed in 1918 by the Soviet government. Some buildings, including both churches and part of the monastery wall, were lost in the 20th century during World War II and the anti-religious campaign, with the result that the monastery is preserved fragmentarily.
Never considered particularly important, it was subjected to rebuilding many times. Built to symbolize and immortalize the miracle of historical significance for the Novgorod Republic, until the present day, the monastery in fact has undertaken certain social functions affecting Novgorodian society. Its history is a story of ups and downs, of ruin and reconstruction. Almost nothing in the present monastery's exterior suggests how ancient the monastery really is.
Name
The formal name of the monastery is the monastery of the Nativity of Our Lady on the Desyatina, where Desyatina might be calqued into English with the word tithe. It is hard to establish exactly what the founder meant by Desyatina (“Tithe”), as it had several meanings in Old East Slavic, but the most widely accepted version is that the monastery was founded on an estate previously owned by the princes of Novgorod called Desyatina. (“Tithe”) In turn, Desyatinny is simply an adjectival form created by suffixes (it is remarkable, that the old-fashioned variant of the name is the adjective with another suffix: Desyatinski.) It is therefore assumed that the princes of Novgorod presented their land, glorified in 1170 by the miracle, to the church.
History
Founding
It is not clear exactly when the monastery was established. The first written reference in the Novgorod First Chronicle states that in 1327 Moses the archbishop erected a church in honour of the Nativity of Our Lady on the Tithe. An extract from the official translation of the chronicle by Mitchell et al. is given below in comparison with the original text in the Old Novgorod dialect of Old East Slavic:
The reference simply shows that the monastery existed in 1327 but does not state when it was founded. Another fact which helps to establish when the monastery was founded is the icon called The Cloudy Assumption: it is accepted that this icon from the early 13th century was brought to Moscow from the monastery's iconostasis. It can therefore be concluded that the monastery was probably founded at the turn of the 12th century.
The version that links the period when the monastery was founded to the miracle which took place on its grounds is likely to be the most significant: in 1170, when Novgorod was besieged by the army of Andrei Bogolubsky, the citizens won a miraculous victory not far from the monastery (the particular site of the miracle, the rampart behind the monastery, is still preserved quite well). It is therefore probably that the monastery was founded soon after the miracle occurred, in order to symbolize and immortalize it. The subsequent history of the monastery is a story of ups and downs.
Early history: the republican period
There was no united Russian state when the monastery was founded, whatever the precise year happens to be. Instead, There were various East Slavic feudal states. The monastery was founded in the capital of the Novgorod Republic, the most economically, politically and socially developed of these. There are written sources in the Novgorod chronicles, inventory acts and other documents, which give an idea of the early history of the monastery. It can therefore be asserted that the monastery was not substantially developed from the time when its main church of stone was built in 1397 until the end of Swedish occupation of Novgorod in 1617.