Lintula Holy Trinity Convent, Russia, Orthodox convent in Ogonki, Russia.
Lintula Holy Trinity Convent is a stauropegic convent in Ogonki, Vyborg District, Leningrad Oblast, Russia. Its current church, rebuilt in 2013, replicates the pre-war church: wide stone steps, high granite retaining walls, and a massive church on top. The convent is a metochion (podvorie) of the Konstantino-Eleninsky Convent in Saint Petersburg.
The convent began in 1894 as a women's Orthodox community on land in Lintula, in the Grand Duchy of Finland; its church was consecrated on 4 June 1895 and the community officially opened on 10 August 1896. It became a monastery on 19 August 1905. After the Winter War the sisters left in 1939, taking the Jerusalem Icon of the Mother of God, and founded a new Lintula convent at Palokki in Finland. Monastic life returned to the Ogonki site in the 2000s as a metochion of the Konstantino-Eleninsky Convent.
The convent's name comes from the village of Lintula, where it was founded in 1895; the Finnish word lintu means bird. The sisters supported themselves by selling apples and eggs at the Terijoki market and delivering milk by horse to wealthy customers there, while vegetables, grain and birch firewood went to Vyborg. A few Finnish women also joined the sisterhood.
The convent stands on the M10 Vyborg–Saint Petersburg road, just before the turn-off to Terijoki (Zelenogorsk); turn at the blue shed-like building. A narrow lane has a widening that fits a bus before it bends sharply left and climbs the hill. The church only comes into view in the courtyard, past wide stone steps and high granite retaining walls.
The convent owes its existence to a train crash: after the 1888 derailment of Tsar Alexander III's train, official Fyodor Neronov escaped a death sentence by funding a girls' shelter and church on his Lintula estate. His father had founded a convent in Kazan, and Neronov followed suit; the site became a convent in 1905.
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