Saint Theodora of Nizhny Novgorod

Theodora (secular name Vassa or Vasilisa, presumably Anastasia Ivanovna; c. 1331, Tver – April 15, 1378, Nizhny Novgorod) was the abbess of the Conception Convent in Nizhny Novgorod and the daughter of a Tver boyar. Her memory is locally venerated on April 16 and March 28 (likely the date of the translation of her relics). As a young girl, she learned to read and studied the Old and New Testaments, desiring to take monastic vows. Her parents, however, opposed this and married her to Prince Andrei Konstantinovich of Suzdal and Nizhny Novgorod when she was 13 years old. In marriage, she did not concern herself with a vain life, but lived piously, dedicating herself to fasting, abstinence, prayer, and almsgiving. She withered her body through the severity of her life, wearing a hair shirt beneath her fine garments. In the early second half of the 14th century, she founded the Conception Convent in Nizhny Novgorod, located on the banks of the Volga near the cape at the mouth of the Pochaina River. After the death of her husband, who had spent his final years as a monk and schema-monk, she took monastic vows in 1367 under the name Theodora (according to some sources, she was initially named Vassa and took the name Theodora upon receiving the Great Schema). She distributed all her property to churches, monasteries, and the poor, granted freedom to her servants, and became the abbess of the convent she had founded. She spent her life in prayer, labor, fasting, and the reading of divine scriptures, living in humility and tears, supporting herself through her own handiwork, and dedicating herself to the adornment of the convent and the increase of its sisterhood, which grew to 160 nuns.