- Place
- Vilnius City Municipality
- Region
- Vilnius
- Type
- active Neo-Byzantine Orthodox convent church
- Address
- 1 Lenkų Street, Vilnius
- Coordinates
- 54.66588, 25.28709
- Visit duration
- 25-40 minutes outside services
- Best time
- by day and according to a convent service schedule checked in advance
Alexander Nevsky Orthodox Church, Church of the Convent of St Mary Magdalene
A church for a railway suburb
During the later nineteenth century, the New World suburb - today's Naujininkai - expanded south of Vilnius railway station. Plans for a local Orthodox church emerged in 1895, and St Alexander Nevsky was completed and consecrated in 1898 to a design associated with architect Mikhail Prozorov.
Its imposing centralised masonry form expresses Neo-Byzantine design through a huge onion dome, tall bell tower, arched openings and dense decorative brick bands. Do not confuse it with the separate memorial chapel of the same dedication that once stood in central Vilnius and no longer survives.
The sisters and a 52-year silence
Sisters of the Convent of St Mary Magdalene settled beside this church in 1938 after losing their earlier home during the upheavals surrounding the First World War.
Soviet authorities closed the church in 1960 and forced the sisters into a wing of the male Monastery of the Holy Spirit. Following restoration, the first liturgy returned here in 2012 after a 52-year interruption.
The convent's route to Naujininkai
The Orthodox Convent of St Mary Magdalene formally opened in Vilnius in 1865, but not in Naujininkai. As the First World War front approached in 1915, its abbess and sisters were evacuated from Vilnius together with their orphanage and school; part of the community returned in 1919.
Because the former buildings had gone back to a Catholic community, the sisters first lived in the former Holy Trinity monastery and moved beside St Alexander Nevsky Church only in 1938. Their return to Lenkų Street in 2015 therefore restored an interwar relationship with this sanctuary, not the convent's original nineteenth-century location.
A women's convent restored in 2015
On 24 May 2015, the community moved back to premises beside the restored St Alexander Nevsky Church. It is now both a neighbourhood architectural landmark and a place of daily women's monastic life.
Restored icons and Orthodox liturgy animate the church. Tourist access must therefore follow its rhythm of prayer: this is not a museum with a permanent exhibition and ticket-desk hours.
Finding and visiting it respectfully
The precise address is 1 Lenkų Street, rather than Gudų Street sometimes used for the wider complex. It lies in Naujininkai roughly a kilometre southeast of the railway station, its dark dome visible above low buildings and trees.
Check the convent's service calendar before setting out. Enter only when the doors are open, dress modestly, silence phones, and never photograph sisters or worship without explicit permission.
