Beheading of St. John 's Monastery

The Beheading of St. John the Forerunner's Monastery, a men's house, stands in rock caves above the Dniester near the village of Lyadova in the Vinnytsia region, in the Mohyliv-Podilskyi eparchy. Ukraine's State Register of Immovable Monuments dates the rock complex itself as an archaeological monument of the ninth to thirteenth centuries³. A central information outlet of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, reporting in 2014 on an archpastoral visit to the monastery, called it founded in 1013 by Venerable Antonii of the Caves on his way from Mount Athos to Kyiv and one of the oldest houses in Ukraine, long known among the people as the "Podolian Athos"⁵.

The earliest written mention of the monastery under its present name dates to April 1649: envoys of Bohdan Khmelnytsky from the Lyadova monastery of the holy prophet John the Forerunner near Mohyliv - Hegumen Pavlo, hieromonk Nykyfor and two monastery servants - crossed into Muscovy that month². An act description of 1782 states that the house had once been established by Orthodox ascetics²; that same year another visitation independently recorded Orthodox monks at the house, whom the documents of the time called "kaluhery"⁴.

From 1734 the monastery is recorded as Uniate (Basilian), and in 1745 it was closed, impoverished^{2, 4}. The house's main church - in honour of the Beheading of the Precious Head of John the Forerunner - had functioned as a parish church from 1772, and became Orthodox in the first half of the nineteenth century².

In 1848 a stone vestibule was added to the church, its second tier serving as a bell-tower. From 1860 to 1900 the parish rector was the priest Volodymyr Stefanovskyi: he improved the road from the village to the churches (1861), built a stone chapel over the wells beside them (1861-1862), and extended the vestibule with an addition reaching the neighbouring church of the holy great martyr Paraskeva (1874)². In 1883-1884 the monastery was described by the Ukrainian historian Volodymyr Antonovych².

On the initiative of Dimitrii (Sambikin), bishop of Podolia and later archbishop, in 1893-1894 a church of Venerable Antonii of the Caves was arranged in one of the abandoned rock chambers: by local tradition, Venerable Antonii, the founder of Rus' monasticism, passed through Lyadova on his way back to Rus' from Athos, and the cave next to the church was considered to have been his dwelling².

In 1938 the parish was abolished and the vestibule blown up. In the 1960s a functioning parish resumed at the church of Venerable Antonii, and in 1998 monastic life resumed at the house. On 26 July 2000 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church blessed this revival, resolving by journal No. 15 of its session to open a men's monastery in honour of the Beheading of St John the Forerunner in the village of Lyadova^{1, 2}.

On 26 October 2014, during an archpastoral visit to the Mohyliv-Podilskyi eparchy, His Beatitude Metropolitan Onufriy, Primate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, arrived at the house and prayed at the evening service in the house church of the icon of the Mother of God "Joy and Consolation". The church, like the whole monastery, had by then been restored in the Athonite style, and services there are conducted using only candles⁵.

The house has preserved a unique "rock chronicle" - a collection of old inscriptions in Russian, Polish, Moldovan, Latin, Armenian, Tatar and Turkish on the outer wall of the Forerunner church; one of the oldest inscriptions, dated 1696, records a visit to this holy place by pilgrims². On the monastery grounds are three springs - of John the Forerunner, Paraskeva, and Antonii of the Caves².

In the early twenty-first century a kimitiry (a catacomb-style crypt) was cut into one of the cave chambers on the model of the analogous structure at Tserkovshchyna in Kyiv; a brotherhood building with a house church in honour of the icon "Joy and Consolation" was built on the terrace, and a bell-tower on the slope above the terrace's north end².

In 2023, 2025 and 2026, on the feast of Epiphany, Metropolitan Ahapit of Mohyliv-Podilskyi and Sharhorod celebrated the Divine Liturgy here together with the house's brotherhood, and after the service led the great blessing of the waters of the Dniester by the monastery^{6, 7, 8}.