Cerkov Vvedenia Presvatoj Bogorodicy

The Church of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary is an Orthodox church in the Volokolamsky parish of the Moscow diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church. It is located in the village of Spirovo, Volokolamsk Urban District, Moscow Region.

The village of Spirovo was the ancestral estate of the Venerable Joseph of Volotsk, granted to his great-grandfather Alexander by the holy Prince Dimitriy Donskoy. At the end of the XV - early XVI centuries St. Joseph established in the village the Vvedensky Bogorodny monastery with a wooden church in honour of the Presentation to the Temple of the MostHoly Mother of God and erected a special church - the "House of God". With the blessing of the abbot and the cathedral elders, homeless people who had died of hunger or accidents were buried in the church.

"They did not know how to name the memorialized, but thought that God hears and knows for whom pure, selfless, truly Christian prayers are sent out to Him," Nikolai Karamzin wrote of such monasteries.

During the famine of 1570, one of the twelve monks survived, the monastery ceased to exist, and the Vvedensky church became a parish church.

In 1825 from the means of the parishioners a stone church in honor of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin was built, in 1848 two side-altars were attached to it, in 1849 - the bell tower. According to data of 1877 a parochial school worked at the church, but according to data of 1890, it was already a parochial school. The church was never closed, and its benefactors at one time were the Pushkins, the Vorontsovs and the Telegins.

The building was built in the style of classicism. The base of the tiered temple part is a two-light, transversely oriented oval hall with rectangular protrusions on the east-west axis. One of them is occupied by the choir. The wooden carved 6-tier iconostasis was installed in 1896-1899.

In the domed part of the summer temple there is a painting based on the famous painting of Russian artist Alexander Ivanov "Appearance of Christ to the People".

There were six bells in the bell tower, three of which had inscriptions about the date of manufacture: the oldest was cast in 1695 and weighed 7 poods, "all-day" - in 1776, a large bell - in 1850.

The Vvedensky temple became the custodian of the great shrines of the Volokolamsk land. From here the relics of the saints were brought to the revived St. Joseph and Volotsky Monastery for its consecration. For many years the deeply revered image of St. Nicholas has remained in the temple, and the monastery's icon of St. Joseph has also been preserved here.

On November 27, 1937, Archpriest Demetrius Lebedev, rector of the church, along with Nikolai Vinogradov, rector of the Church of the Ascension in the neighboring village of Teryaevo, were shot and buried in an unknown mass grave at Butovo Field near Moscow. The martyrs were canonized by the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000.