Holy Dormition Sviatohirsk Lavra

The Sviatohirsk Lavra of the Dormition is a men's stauropegial cenobitic monastery of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church; the Primate of the Church is its sacred archimandrite by virtue of his office². The monastery stands in Sviatohirsk in the Donetsk region, on Zarichna Street¹.

The Lavra has set out its own history on its site by periods: the founding of the monastery, then the chronicle of the house for 1787-1844, 1844-1922 and 1922-1992, and its recent history separately¹. There too are pages on the saints of the monastery - St John the Recluse and the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of Sviatohirsk - the schedule of services, and a whole section for the pilgrim: how to get there, the guest house, the refectory, the monastery shops¹. In the media library, beside the photograph gallery and the video, lie musical scores and sermons¹.

The monastery opened its video channel on 26 May 2014³. It carried live broadcasts of services from 2016, and a separate collection on the channel keeps about one thousand seven hundred such recordings³.

Its broadcasting now is arranged differently. The bulk of it is a multimedia Orthodox calendar: a daily issue about the saint or the feast of the day, and a survey of the week ahead which has a name of its own, "Sedmytsia"³. Beside these run short answers to simple questions about church life, recordings of the chants of the brethren's choir, and documentaries about the Holy Mountains³. A live broadcast has become a rarity here: of the more than three hundred videos that come out in a year, barely fifteen are live, and the rest are short ready-made features, none of them longer than half an hour³.