Publications
Imposed obedience bears no spiritual fruit
• an interview with Hieromonk Nikolai Sakharov
6 Sep 2026 An interview with Hieromonk Nikolai Sakharov — the nephew of Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov, the well-known Athonite spiritual father, elder and theologian who founded the Monastery of Saint John the Baptist in Essex, Great Britain, and the author of many books, among them "On Prayer", "We Shall See Him As He Is", "Saint Silouan the Athonite" and others. Father Nikolai speaks of his life, of his spiritual labour and prayer, and of the theology of Archimandrite Sophrony.
What one must remember throughout the whole of Great Lent
• an interview with the Primate
15 Mar 2026 An Orthodox Christian must accept with dignity what God is now allowing us to live through. We have to endure it with courage, with prayer, with hope in God and in the mercy of God. In such conditions prayer is absolutely essential. A great many words have already been spoken, people today are overloaded with information, but what the world badly lacks is prayer. And that is why I believe that the chief task of our Church today is to pray to God, to ask the Lord that He, in sending us trials, ... 
The First World War in the life of Hieromonk Philip Part II
• an essay on spiritual life in time of war
19 Feb 2026 The continuation of the essay "The First World War in the life of Hieromonk Philip"
Spiritual fatherhood
• A journal version of the book by Schema-Archimandrite Gabriel (Bunge)
3 Jan 2026 “And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven” (King James Version), it is said in the Gospel. And if the Christian tradition already in the first centuries gave to certain men — bishops, priests and monks — the name of “fathers”, then this means that the spiritual fatherhood of these men served as the means through which the heavenly, divine fatherhood was known by experience. The knowledge of the first led to the knowledge of the second. ... 
The First World War in the life of Hieromonk Philip Part I
• an essay on spiritual life in time of war
12 Nov 2025 A single shot in Sarajevo in June 1914 — and at once everything was overturned. The life of Hieromonk Philip (Stavitsky) changed with it. Under his editorship the church-and-people weekly "Свет Печерский", which he had himself founded, comes out every week at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. The edition goes out in thousands of copies to parishes across almost the whole empire and serves pastors as "an irreplaceable help in delivering homilies and in conducting talks outside the ... 
The venerable fathers took very little from the world, but gave the world a great deal
10 Sep 2025 An interview with His Beatitude Metropolitan Onufriy of Kyiv and All Ukraine
The Impulse to Serve
26 Aug 2025 The Lavra's guest houses stopped receiving guests. From outside they were blockaded. But inside, life went on. Responsibility would not allow them to abandon everything to its fate… to leave it all to those for whom the life of the Lavra is a matter of complete indifference, if not altogether unbearable… That, in fact, is the difference: one person serves out his time in a monastery and only waits for the end of the working day so as to be beyond the Lavra's gates as soon as possible, while ...
The Lord's Prayer
• an article by Archpriest Georgy Chistyakov
18 Apr 2025 A fragment from the book "Над строками Нового Завета" by the priest Georgy Chistyakov, devoted to the well-known but, as it turns out, quite difficult to understand, prayer "Our Father"
If you love God — everything will work out for you
• an interview with Archimandrite Antoniy (Novytskyi)
15 Nov 2024 Archimandrite Antoniy (Novytskyi) is the first man to be tonsured at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra after its restoration in 1988, an experienced spiritual father, an unfailing singer in the brotherhood choir and a priest who bestows a truly fatherly love upon everyone who comes to him for a blessing. During our conversation I listened spellbound to the elder's distinctive manner of speech — a melodic Ukrainian which is, sadly, lost in translation. We spoke about the life of the Church in Soviet ... 
The Gospel in the light of new research
9 Jul 2024 The temptation not to stand firm before a mystery, the wish to reduce it to a law of nature or to give it some arbitrary explanation, are especially strong where the Gospel narrative is concerned. What has not been ascribed to the divine Word in the whole course of Christian history: apocrypha, "rejected writings", pseudo-gospels, to say nothing of the multitude of bogus interpretations. All of this cluttered the Gospel text and added confusion. It is not surprising that the preservation of ...
But the greatest of these is charity
• an article by Archimandrite Alexy (Koval)
23 Feb 2024 Faith and hope cease when a man sees with his own eyes the One in whom he believed, and all his hopes, longings and expectations are fulfilled, while love then grows especially and becomes the strongest
How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!
• Schema-Archimandrite Theodosius (Smaga) 1877-1946
2 Aug 2023 When one becomes acquainted with the biography of Archimandrite Trifiliy, in the schema Theodosius (Smaga), one is struck by the whirl of events into which a man may fall not by his own will but by the Providence of God. In the quiet pre-revolutionary years this was an ordinary monk of the Lavra, in no way particularly remarkable, in whose life there were few striking events but for the most part the patient bearing of obediences, day after day.Father Trifiliy was 40 years old when everything ... 
Appeal to the brethren from the place of detention
18 Jul 2023 I am writing to you from the Lukianivka pre-trial detention centre in Kyiv ...
Choir master
• in memory of Archimandrite Roman (Podlubniak)
9 Jul 2023 Recollections of the precentor of the seminary choir, Archimandrite Roman (Podlubniak),our dear teacher, mentor and father.
First Photos of the Lavra after Opening in 1988
• archival photographs
25 Jun 2023 06/25/1988 (exactly 35 years ago) the first buildings of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra were passed to the monastic brethren. The inhabitants of the monastery came to the Caves’ hills to light up the prayer lampad here. These photos are the part of the private archive of metropolitan Jonathan of Tulchin and Bratslav who was the first Vicegerent of the Kiev-Caves Lavra after the rebirth of the monastic life here in 1988.
At the Call of the Heart
• interview with Samuel Milko
28 Apr 2023 Leave everything and come to the Lavra, overcoming doubts and misunderstandings of the loved ones, but how one can explain to them that here and now something important is happening not only for the Lavra but, in general, for the whole Orthodoxy, that, wherever you are, whatever you do, your thoughts are still at the Lavra gates unable to resist this impulse of the soul and heart. Thousand-kilometer distances, moving to another country, which is already dangerous due to martial law, ... 
How not to fall away from the Church in times of trial
• an interview with the Primate
9 Feb 2023 It is we who do not suit the Church, and not the Church that does not suit us. She always was, is and will be the Body of Christ. And in this Body everything is harmonious, everything is rightly ordered. If we want good for ourselves, if we want to restore the Divine harmony within ourselves, then we must adjust ourselves to the Church and not the other way round
We live to please God
• a life of Archimandrite Longin (Chernukha) 1972-2013
12 Nov 2022 In the usual idea of monasticism there is hardly room for joy, for indulgence towards human weakness, and still less for the world of childhood. Everything is somehow wound around a severe idealism, a merciless self-restraint, a renunciation for the sake of serving God — of family, of property, of the world's bustle… For some reason few understand that a calling does not depersonalise, but on the contrary brings out ever greater gifts. And that in monasticism what seems incompatible is ... 
The basic conditions of right prayer
• an article by Archimandrite Alexy (Koval)
15 Sep 2022 Prayer is not only a means for the acquiring of virtue - it is itself a virtue in its living expression. Prayer gives wings to the human soul, makes it light and capable of every good deed, brings down upon it the abundance of the grace of God, and makes human life truly Christian
Our Kirillich
• in memory of Archimandrite Kyryl (Kutsyn)
20 Jul 2022 And how does so much kindness fit into one man? … It is hard to say when Vasyl Kutsyn gave himself over to what was by no means a romantic enthusiasm for monasticism. But when, in the autumn of 2001, he came to the Pochaiv Lavra, he already had eight years of hard work behind him — first in his native Transcarpathia, and then in the Czech Republic and Russia. Without going into the details of that difficult period of wanderings abroad, let us note only how steadily the adolescent ... About this part of the section
Publications is the largest part of the Articles section. It holds the longer texts: memoirs and conversations with people whose lives were bound up with the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, archival photographs with explanations, church documents and addresses, and texts on church history and tradition. The material spans many years, and the oldest of it preserves testimony about events there is no longer anyone left to ask about.
How to read the list
Each row is one publication: its title, its date and the opening of the text. Click the title to open it in full. A publication is kept in the language in which its author wrote it — Ukrainian or Russian — rather than retold in our own words; titles and summaries appear in English wherever a translation exists.
Rights in the material
This section is edited by the Synodal Commission of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church for Monastery Affairs, publisher of Monastic Herald of Ukraine. If you hold the rights to a text or a photograph published here and believe it has been used without your consent, please contact us as set out on the page for rightsholders.
Where to go next
Short reports on events are gathered in News, documentaries and reports in Video. The monasteries themselves are described in the monastery directory and shown on the map, while services being celebrated right now can be watched in the live broadcasts. The about page describes the Commission and this resource in more detail.
