The Kirsanov Local History Museum houses a painting depicting the Ascension Church in the Boratynskys’ estate of Mara (now the village of Sofyinka, Umetsky District). The artwork was painted by Yulia Pokrovskaya, a mentee of the sisters Anastasia Sergeyevna Boratynskaya and Elizaveta Antonovna Delvig. Yulia Vasilievna Pokrovskaya (married Goretskaya) was brought up by A. S. Boratynskaya and E. A. Delvig from the age of five. She lived on the Mara estate as a daughter and in 1901 was married to Nikolay Goretsky. In the Kirsanov Local History Museum there are several photographs of Y. V. Goretskaya, in one of them she is photographed with her guardian and mentor E.A.Delvig in the estate of Mara.

The background story of the Ascension Church in Mara is as follows. In 1812, the Intercession Church, where Yevgeny Boratynsky had been baptized, burnt down. A wooden chapel was built temporarily at the site of the fire. And after the feast of the Intercession of the Theotokos, the Bishop went to the poet’s mother Alexandra Fedorovna Boratynskaya to ask her to start building a new church. She wrote to her brother-in-law, a retired navy admiral Bogdan Andreevich Boratynsky, in the Smolensk estate:

The foundation of the Ascension Church was laid on the summer holiday of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker. In 1818, the construction was completed. At the beginning of 1819, icons, a painted cross, a shroud and processional banners for the church were commissioned to the painter A. Sokolov in Moscow. Later almshouses were built (two stone ones for eight people and a wooden one for three people); a holy spring was consecrated.

It is the last resting place for the poet Y. A. Boratynsky’s mother, brother, wife, nephews and nieces, as well as other members of the family and neighbors on the estate. The church stood for about a century and a half. Its fate mirrored that of many other churches, but it was also unique in its own way, as members of one of the most famous families in Russia, the Boratynskys, were baptized, married and buried here.

The parents of the teacher S. A. Rachinsky were subsequently married in this church; the grandfather of Metropolitan Veniamin (Fedchenkov) and he himself officiated there. The family necropolis of the Boratynskys was built behind the church altar.