Surrounded by a sprawl of high-rise apartments built in the late 60’s for housing, now crumbling, is the Novaspasskiy Monastery which once lorded over the hill in Taganka. The main structures of note is the four-tied belltower, the Church of the Saviour, the Church of the Sign, and the chapel (which is of significant importance).

The Monastery claims to be Moskov’s oldest, its beginnings dating back to the 12th Century. Its location is not the original one, nor are the buildings, razed by the Tartars in the 17th Century, but the buildings were restored and they still stand.

However, its ragged history and importance uniquely breaks the Illusion: The Bolsheveiks used the walled-in Monastery as a concentration camp, shooting the imprisoned along the northern wall in the almshouse and hospital. It then became an orphanage where children were subject to the molestation of those subjected to Chagidiel’s influence, then made into a NKVD archive where all manner of horror was kept hidden from the public - reports of planned assassinations and genocide - for the better of the nation, and drunk-tank to house, well the obvious, but it should be said that not all drunks made it out alive. Where the monks use to draw water out of the pond outside the western wall the NKVD buried foreign Communists shot during the purge in the 30’s.

This has made the Illusion extremely weak here. In Inferno the Monastery is mirrored in a future-self; the horrors of the past continue, but this site is near Chagidiel’s citadel. Here children are imprisoned in the Religious concentration camp, subjected to rape, murder, and mental abuse by the future transformation of the Princess Trakanova and false priests taken from Binah’s influence (see below) whose failed vindication and release drove her insane to inflict her same pain on children.

To heap more woe onto this horrific site is one more disturbance which is active today, greatly affecting the future of the Novaspasskiy Monastery.

The derelict tent-roofed chapel is the resting chamber of the body of Princess Trakanova, so the story goes, and it is a story used to inspire faith of a person devoted to God.