In 1885, Countess Evgenia Efimovskaya, who later became Abbess Catherine, founded an Orthodox women's monastery in the village of Lesna, located on the border of Russia with what was then Austria-Hungary (now part of Poland). However, political events forced the monastery to change its location several times. With the onset of World War I, the monastery moved to Petrograd, in 1917 to Bessarabia, and then in 1920 to the Serbian monastery of Hopovo. Since 1950, the monastery has been located in France: first in Furke near Paris, and since 1967, in the Provenon estate in Normandy. For over 50 years, the monastery has been situated in an ancient 18th-century French castle. The main shrine of the monastery is the miraculous icon of the Mother of God, found in 1683 in a nearby forest by local peasants.