Vladimir Putin handed Andrei Rublev's "Trinity" to the Russian Orthodox Church, the press service of the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia reports . The report says that this was done “in response to numerous requests from Orthodox believers.”
According to the decision of Patriarch Kirill, the icon, which is now kept in the Tretyakov Gallery, will be exhibited for a year in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, and then transferred to the Trinity Cathedral of the Holy Trinity Sergius Lavra in the Moscow region.
The Trinity, painted in the first half of the 15th century, was kept in the Lavra until 1929, when the Soviet authorities handed it over to the Tretyakov Gallery.
Earlier, on May 13, the St. Petersburg diocese reported that the Russian Orthodox Church would take Alexander Nevsky's shrine from the Hermitage. A silver shrine weighing one and a half tons, intended to store the relics of the saint, was made by order of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna in the middle of the 18th century. Until 1922 she was in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.
In July 2022, the Trinity left the Tretyakov Gallery for three days: it was transferred to the Holy Trinity Sergius Lavra to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the acquisition of the relics of St. Sergius of Radonezh. The restorers opposed this trip, fearing that the icon would suffer. The restoration council, which met in September, recorded 61 damages, including five serious ones.
In February 2023, the Ministry of Culture fired the director of the Tretyakov Gallery, Zelfira Tregulova, and Elena Pronicheva, the daughter of the former head of the FSB border service, took her place.