Temple-Church of the Icon of the Mother of God «The Life-Bearing Spring»
The temple of the Icon of the Mother of God The Life-giving Spring in Bibirev is located at 11B Leskova Street. In the Orthodox tradition, the Mother of God is called the Life—giving Source, glorified as the Source of life, because Christ was born from Her – the Way, Truth and Life. In honor of the renovation (that is, reconstruction and decoration) of the temple of the “Receiving Source” in the Orthodox Church, a holiday is celebrated on Friday of Holy Week. The prototype of the icon of the Mother of God “Life-giving Spring” is the ancient Greek Mother of God, painted according to the type of Nicopaea Kyriotissa, which, in turn, goes back to an even more ancient image of the Mother of God, associated with the famous Blachernae temple in ancient Christianity and the veneration of the Blachernae image of the Virgin in the form of a marble statue located near the imperial bathhouse. Holy water — agiasma – flowed from the hands of the statue. At first, the lists from the icon of the “Life-giving Source” were written without an image of the above-mentioned source itself. A little later, icon painters began to include an image of a bowl in the composition of the image of the Mother of God, and in even later lists of the icon, an image of a fountain or a reservoir appears. In the Russian tradition, icon painters depicted a well as a symbol of a spring. The XVII century is the period of the greatest spread of this type of icon. In the Russian tradition of icon painting, the icon has undergone further complication of the composition, which may indirectly indicate a decrease in its original symbolic fullness, going back to the original Greek images based on the statue of the Virgin of Blachernae with holy water flowing from her hands. Images of storehouses with water gushing from them begin to appear on icons, and Saints Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian and John Chrysostom can be depicted on the sides of the Mother of God. In the Russian tradition, the icon “Life-giving Source” also has the names “Life-giving Source”, “Receiving Source” or simply “Source”. All names reflect the essence of the image.
Address: Moscow, Leskova str., 11B
