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# During the brief but most brutal Nazi occupation of the Moscow region, a great many museums and churches came under attack
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/vo-vremia-neprodolzhitelnoi-no-zhestochaishei-okkupatsii-fashistami-podmoskovia-pod-udarom-okazalos-mnozhestvo-muzeev-i-khramov/
- Published: 2020-05-09T10:48:35.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:42:44.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Faith, Museums, Heritage

During the brief but most brutal Nazi occupation of the Moscow region, a great many museums and churches came under attack. People of science and art threw all their strength into saving the treasures of culture: very many collections simply could not be evacuated in time, and their fate had to be decided on the spot.

At the New Jerusalem Monastery, the three remaining research staff, I.S. Pikhchakhchi, V.N. Ignatyeva and P.S. Ivanova, together with the director, S.M. Prusakov, fitted out hiding places. One must understand that the work went on covertly, in secret from everyone around, and above all amid the constant prowling of the Nazis. The antique furniture was carried into a secret chamber beneath the monastery refectory, while a great many ancient icons, paintings, old Gospels, tableware, sculptures, porcelain, church plate, textiles, jewels, candlesticks and the archive were hidden in a cache in the Resurrection Cathedral: a concealed room, the entrance to which it was decided to wall up.

How was this to be done under surveillance? By bricking up the door and building a false wall. The devoted four museum workers resolved to carry the bricks in suitcases: there must be not a single witness, lest anyone inform the Nazis of the cache or plunder the monastery's treasury himself. The carefully sealed passage was plastered, made flush with the rest of the wall and painted in the same colour. The operation was a success.

But in December 1941, as the German troops retreated, they laid five hundred mines in the monastery, and the cathedral was blown up. Several caches were destroyed; the last one survived, but two of its keepers were by then dead, and Vera Ignatyeva, the one left alive, was in Syzran, working in a hospital there. It was she who informed the executive committee that museum valuables were hidden in the cathedral. Together with two colleagues, she gradually cleared a way to the secret room amid the ruins of the cathedral, found the entrance, took down the wall and discovered almost a thousand items intact.

*P.S. Ignatyeva, who preserved valuable exhibits for the country, was in no way honoured by the authorities; her two colleagues who helped to clear the rubble and search for the cache, Danilova and Golovina, received letters of thanks from the People's Commissar for Education, Potemkin.*