Savior of the Holy Face Pustyn – Created in Soviet Days

The history of the Savior of the Holy Face Pustyn began with the settlement of monks in the village of Klykovo after the Holy Vvedensky Optina Pustyn was devastated. The village church in honor of the Icon of the Savior of the Holy Face has become the center of their spiritual life. In the 18th century this icon was in a wooden church in the neighboring village of Kurynichi, and after the fire which happened there, only this shrine and the Gospel survived. The icon appeared in Klykovo in the 1820s, when cholera struck the village. The image of the Savior of the Holy Face was served round the village, and the epidemic receded. The icon remained in Klykovo, and even a new stone temple was erected in honor of it, the one around which a community was formed a century later.The community, founded in the period of religious persecutions, existed only 13 years and was destroyed in 1937. In the 1990s, the church was rebuilt, and the community around it was envisaged to revive: this was the way the monastery of the Savior of the Holy Face was established. Twenty monks in all work in the monastery, but the number of shrines kept here is impressive: these are the particles of the relics of Apostle Andrew, the martyrs of the early Christian period, Sergius of Radonezh, the Optina elders and the patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church.