Feodosia Morozova

After her husband's early death in 1662, she retained a prominent position at the Russian court as a lady-in-waiting to Tsarina Maria.

During the Raskol, because Archpriest Avvakum was her confessor, Morozova joined the Old Believers' movement and secretly took monastic vows with the name Theodora.

[E 3] Following Avvakum, she rejected the reforms of Patriarch Nikon insisting he had no authority in the church to alter established practices, identifying such innovations with the corruption of the faith by the antichrist.

[E 3] Nevertheless, her reputation was limited until Morozova's role as a representative of Russian identity and tradition became important to nationalist writers in the 19th century.

The People's Will revolutionary movement promoted her, and her virtues were praised by writers of the Soviet era such as Anna Akhmatova, Varlam Shalamov and Fazil Iskander, who "symbolically enlisted her in their own causes of resistance".

Boyaryna Morozova by Vasily Surikov is depicting Morozova's arrest by the Nikonites in 1671. As an Old Believer , she holds two fingers, rather than three, raised in the old way of making the sign of the cross .
A chapel constructed on the supposed site of Morozova's death