Saint Matrona of Moscow (Matrona Dimitrievna Nikonova) was a blind Russian ascetic and wonderworker whose ministry of counsel and prayerful healing spanned the most turbulent decades of the twentieth century. Born in 1881 in the village of Sebino, in the Tula province, into a poor and devout peasant family, she was blind from birth, and by tradition her eyelids were closed over empty eye sockets. Despite this affliction, she was held from childhood to possess a spiritual sight, and people came to her with their troubles from her own village and, in time, from far beyond it.
From her early years Matrona was associated with gifts of prayer, spiritual discernment, and the foreseeing of events. The synaxarion relates that even as a child people sought her out for comfort and counsel, and that she prayed for the healing of the sick. At about the age of seventeen, according to the tradition of her life, she lost the use of her legs and remained unable to walk for the rest of her days, an affliction she is said to have borne without complaint.
In 1925 Matrona settled in Moscow, where she lived through the years of Soviet anti-religious persecution. Having no settled home of her own, she moved repeatedly among the houses, apartments, and basements of those who sheltered her, while a continual stream of visitors came to her seeking spiritual instruction, consolation, and healing. She counseled those weighed down by illness, grief, and fear, and her life is filled with accounts of healings and of warnings that helped people avoid danger.
Saint Matrona reposed in 1952 and was buried in the Danilov cemetery in Moscow, which became a place of pilgrimage as veneration of her grew. Her relics were uncovered in 1998, and in 1999 she was glorified among the saints by the Patriarchate of Moscow. Her relics now rest in the Protection (Pokrovsky) Convent in Moscow, which remains a major center of her veneration; she is commemorated on May 2.
