According to tradition, the village of Staraia Maina was founded between 1655 and 1661 by monks from the Kostroma Epiphany Monastery, which is why it was named Epiphany. This name was preserved until the 1917 revolution, and many locals still refer to their homeland as Epiphany.

One of the first churches in the village was a wooden one, built in 1777. It had two altars: the Epiphany altar and the altar of Saint Nicholas of Myra.

Later, in 1823, a stone church was erected in honor of the Holy Epiphany, funded and initiated by Count Dmitry Nikolaevich Bludov. Count Bludov, a well-known statesman and member of the committee for the liberation of serfs from serfdom, owned an estate in the village of Tankeevka, not far from Epiphany. There, he also built a large church, which became his second project. The count actively purchased land and created peasant communities, one of which was in Epiphany. It was for this community that he built the new Epiphany church.

In 2003, the 180th anniversary of the opening of this unique memorial church was celebrated.

There is a legend about how the locals surprised the empress: they covered the road 12 km long from the pier to the village of Golovkino with salt and transported the empress in a sleigh during the summer. The sleigh moved smoothly and evenly, as if on snow. Catherine spent the night in a new house built specifically for her arrival, resembling a terem made of two connected huts. Upon returning to St. Petersburg, pleased with the reception, the empress allocated funds for the construction of a stone palace and church on the site of the wooden house and exempted the peasants involved in the construction from taxes for three years. The palace and church, built according to the design of architect Bazhenov, became architectural monuments and adornments of the region. After the revolution, the palace was dismantled, while the church stood until the 1950s, but in a dilapidated state, it was flooded along with the village by the waters of the Volga reservoir.