The Andreevsky men’s monastery at Plennitsy was endowed in 1648 by Boyar Feodor Rtishchev in honour of the victory of Russian troops in battle over Crimean Tatars at a ford outside Moscow in 1591.
The ford was later named the Crimean Ford. The monastery’s golden age came at the end of the XVII century when a ‘teaching fraternity’ made its home within the monastery’s walls, bringing together the most well-educated monks of the time ‘for the sake of book learning’. The ‘fraternity’ later laid the foundation for a Slavonic, Greek and Latin academy, effectively becoming the first institution of higher education in