In the Caucasus, in the city of Mozdok, located on the Terek River, in the Stavropol province, there is a wooden church of the Assumption of the Mother of God. In this church, behind the right choir, in an icon case, there is an ancient miraculous icon of the Iveron Mother of God. The following historical information about this pan-Caucasian shrine has been preserved.
In the 13th century, the famous Georgian Queen Tamar, after the death of her first husband, Russian Prince Georgiy Andreevich, married the Ossetian prince David Soslan. Zealous for the spread and establishment of Christianity among her husband’s fellow tribesmen, Queen Tamar converted almost all of Ossetia to Christ, built many churches and monasteries and supplied them with sacred books and icons.
At the same time, she sent the newly enlightened Christians in the Kartalin Gorge of the Caucasus Mountains an exact copy of the miraculous Iveron Icon of the Mother of God, as a most precious gift to the Ossetian people. Twice the wooden church in the gorge was destroyed to the ground by fire, and both times the holy icon of the Mother of God remained completely unharmed.
For six hundred years the icon remained in the Kartalin gorge. At the end of the last 18th century, Mohammedanism, through Turkish emissaries, invaded the Caucasus mountains with the greatest fanaticism, eradicating traces of ancient Christianity. Many Ossetians leaned towards Islam, but the inhabitants of the gorge remained devoted to their ancestral shrine.
When, during the reign of Empress Catherine II, the Russian government founded the Mozdok fortress on the border line and invited Caucasian Christian mountaineers to settle under the protection of Russian garrisons, the Ossetian clans decided to move beyond the Terek.
In 1793, a party of Ossetian mountaineers led by elders arrived in Mozdok on the eve of the Mid-Pentecost holiday, reverently carrying the miraculous icon of the Mother of God on a cart. The procession was marked by miraculous healings and signs. His Grace Gaius, Bishop of Mozdok and Madzhar, met the shrine with a procession of the cross with all the city clergy.
The bishop intended to erect a shrine in the city cathedral, but a miraculous sign - the cart stopping at a wooden chapel on the outskirts - revealed the goodwill of the Mother of God to remain among the simple migrant people. The wooden Assumption Church was erected on this site.
Currently, thousands of baptized Ossetians, Kabardians and Georgians live around Mozdok and in the city itself. They revere the icon as their main intercessor; Not only Orthodox Christians, but also Armenian Gregorians and surrounding Muslim mountaineers flock to it with reverence, amazed by the many healings performed at the icon.
However, the wooden church, built more than sixty years ago, has completely dilapidated over time and cannot accommodate tens of thousands of pilgrims coming from all over the Caucasus, Don, Astrakhan, Yekaterinoslav, Kharkov and Kyiv provinces.
At the request of the Caucasian authorities, Emperor Alexander Nikolayevich deigned to open a widespread subscription in all departments of the empire to collect voluntary donations for the construction of a majestic stone cathedral in Mozdok in the name of Our Lady of Iveron, in order to adequately decorate the ancient All-Caucasian shrine.