Goritsky Monastery (Goritsy)

The convent is 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) north of the town of Kirillov, Kirillovsky District, which was the site of one of the historically most important (as well as wealthiest) male monasteries in Russia, and to which Tsar Ivan the Terrible, discussed below, had planned to retire.

[1] In 1563, as the Livonian war with Lithuania, Poland and Sweden led to the oprichnina, the aristocratic widow was forced to become a nun and kept under house arrest at Goritsky, together with her daughter-in-law, Yevdokiya Staritskaya.

In 1586 Anna Koltovskaya, Ivan the Terrible's fourth wife, might also have taken monastic vows and changed her name to Daria at Goritsky, before being transferred to the Vvedensky convent in Tikhvin.

Xenia Godunova, the daughter of Tsar Boris Godunov, became the nun Olga at Goritsky circa 1606, before being transferred to the Knyaginin Convent in Vladimir and later burial with her royal family at the Trinity Lavra of St.

[2] The convent's most recent famous resident may have been Fool for Christ Asenatha of Goritsky, who died in 1892 (and whom Russian Orthodox faithful continue to remember on April 19).