Balaclava St. George's Monastery

Balaclava St. George's Monastery of the Simferopol Diocese is a house on Cape Fiolent, the rocky Black Sea shore at the south-western edge of Sevastopol^{1, 2}. On the time of its foundation the sources give at least five different answers, and the most widely repeated of them has no documentary basis².

The careful search for information about the beginning of the house, which the Holy Synod conducted in 1793 and 1794 in Crimea and Mariupol, produced nothing: all that was copied out was the inscription on the stone gravestone of Hieromonk Gervasy Sumelioti bearing the dates 1775 and 1760, the left of which was misread as 1175².

After that the datings multiplied. In 1820 an unnamed author, reporting the words of Metropolitan Chrysanthos, who then governed the monastery, wrote that the house had arisen in the time of the Tatars, that is, no earlier than the thirteenth century; and in 1839 the superior, Metropolitan Agathangelos, reported to the church authorities that the monastery had existed since the time when the Genoese held Chersonesos, that is, since 1350².

From the appearance of the basilican church in depictions of the house made at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Crimean scholar Alexander Bertier-Delagarde in 1910 assigned the foundation to the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries². An academic survey of the monasteries of Crimea likewise dates the Balaclava house no earlier than the end of the fourteenth and the fifteenth century⁶, while in 1993 the historian Vasyl Filipenko proposed that it was founded in the fifteenth century by monks of the Inkerman house, which had fallen empty after the Turkish conquest of Crimea in 1475².

The best-known version, however, comes from a pamphlet published in 1862 by the superior, Archimandrite Nikon². Citing a tradition passed down from generation to generation, he asserted that the house had been founded about the year 891 by Greek merchants: caught in a storm, they prayed to the holy great-martyr George, and he appeared to them on a rocky islet near the shore, after which the wind died down². The rescued seafarers found an icon of Saint George at the place of the appearance and built a cave church on the shore, beside which the most devout of them remained to live².

Bertier-Delagarde took this account apart point by point: earlier sources carry no such information; a monastery beside the cathedral city of the bishop of Chersonesos could not have been founded with the blessing of the ruling hierarch of the Scythian eparchy, whose see stood near the mouth of the Danube; and Bishop Vetranion, named in the pamphlet, lived in the fourth century². "Let not the wondrous, God-given beauty of St. George's monastery be smothered by inventions," the scholar wrote².

In 1874 the writer Fyodor Livanov, accepting the claim of a foundation in 891, added to it that the rock church had been made as early as the first century by the holy martyr Clement of Rome, exiled to Crimea, and that in the fourth century the holy martyr Basil of Chersonesos had lived beside it².

The first documentary evidence of the house was left in 1578 by the Polish envoy Martin Broniewski: he described how not far from the sea, on a stony height, stands a monastery of Saint George, and how all the Greeks then living on the Tauric peninsula gathered there yearly in great numbers and celebrated their annual feast⁸. Muscovite charters of the years 1598 to 1628 mention the yearly alms sent to the house of "George the Passion-bearer, which is in Korsun"².

On 23 April 1771 there arrived in Crimea the newly appointed holder of the see of Gothia and Kaffa, then the only see on the peninsula, Metropolitan Saint Ignatius (Gazadini); stepping ashore in Balaclava bay, he visited the monastery that same day, on the commemoration of Saint George².

When in 1778 part of the Christians of Crimea resettled in the Azov region under Saint Ignatius, a single monk, Kallinik, remained in the house and cared for it until new brethren came². In 1792 the official Leontiy Chernyavsky visited him and recorded that he had found a hundred-year-old elder living as a hermit in a cell below the monastery, built by his own hands, and that the deep old age joined to a vigorous spirit, and above all the kindly welcome, filled his guest with heartfelt respect².

Kallinik told his guest that the Tatars had long revered the healing power of the water from the monastery springs, came to it without weapons, kept the fast and brought fish and fruit with them, and that the free treatment had won many murzas and beys to the house². It was this reverence for the water that the elder held to be the reason the monastery had not been destroyed as other holy places of Crimea had been².

After Crimea was joined to the Russian Empire in 1783 the house came to be visited more⁷, and in 1794 it was placed under the Holy Synod and began to be officially called the Balaclava St. George's Monastery⁷.

In its ordering the monastery long remained Greek: the services were celebrated in Greek, Greeks predominated among the brethren until 1837, and superiors were appointed from among Greeks until 1854². Three times the superiors were hierarchs - Archbishop Ignatius of Reondazh, and after him Metropolitans Chrysanthos of Neopatras and Agathangelos Tipaldo, whose terms together covered the years from 1794 to 1854².

On 23 March 1806 thirteen hieromonks were added to the establishment of the house to serve aboard the ships of the Black Sea Fleet, and on 1 December 1813 their number was doubled - from then on the monastery came to be called the fleet monastery². The fleet hieromonks served not only aboard ship but also in the shore fortresses and hospital churches; squadrons setting out on campaign saluted the house with their guns, and it saw the ships off with the ringing of its bells².

In the first half of the nineteenth century the house was renewed: on the terrace a new church of Saint George and a refectory were raised, on the plateau the cemetery church of the Exaltation of the Cross of 1850, and blocks for the brethren and for pilgrims². The monastery terrace was strengthened with buttresses in 1840 and 1841, and at its foot the spring of Saint George was given an architectural setting in 1816 and 1846². Among the benefactors of the house were members of the imperial family and the admirals of the Black Sea Fleet Feodor Ushakov and Mikhail Lazarev².

The monastery, as Metropolitan Agathangelos observed, was by its situation and its historical antiquity a place visited by every traveller in Crimea². Among its guests were the emperors Alexander I in 1818 and 1825 and Nicholas I in 1837, the poets Alexander Pushkin and Alexander Griboyedov, the painter Ivan Aivazovsky, the dramatist Alexander Ostrovsky, and the writers Ivan Bunin and Anton Chekhov².

Pushkin stayed the night at the house together with General Nikolai Raevsky and his son and was entertained in the refectory². "St. George's monastery and its steep stairway down to the sea made a powerful impression on me," the poet wrote^{2, 6}. The second visit of Alexander I passed into history as the fatal one: the emperor was in a light uniform, a cold wind was blowing, and he arrived at Taganrog from Sevastopol gravely ill².

During the Crimean War the house lived through an occupation. On 14 September 1854 English and French troops took Balaclava and entered the monastery, where the Exaltation of the Cross was being kept that day^{2, 6}. Soon afterwards the French command issued an order: "The monastery of Saint George is placed under the protection of the allied forces"; soldiers and all others following the army were forbidden to enter it by force, to disturb its inhabitants or to violate rights of property^{2, 6}.

A detachment of soldiers was assigned to guard the house, and those who broke its peace were sent to the guardhouse for two or three weeks². For nearly two years half the brethren, led by Archimandrite Gerontios, did not leave the monastery grounds, while the fleet hieromonks took part in the defence of Sevastopol². In April 1855 the laying of an undersea cable between the monastery and Varna in Bulgaria was completed, to speed telegraphic communication between the allies and London and Paris².

On leaving Crimea the foreign troops laid waste the monastery farm, destroyed the vineyards and the orchard, felled the woodland and carried off several of the most ancient icons². On 30 June 1856 their ships left Balaclava, and the brethren were awarded medals for the defence of Sevastopol and in memory of the war of 1853 to 1856².

Relying on Father Nikon's pamphlet and believing that the house was completing a thousand years in 1891, the superior, Hegumen Nikandr, arranged a jubilee celebration and works of renewal at the monastery². Bishop Martinian of Taurida did not share the intention: "For want of scientific grounds for assigning the beginning of the Balaclava St. George's monastery to the year 891, I shall not seek the blessing of the Holy Synod for a celebration," he wrote on 23 May 1891^{2, 6}.

For the arrival of the guests a new stairway down to the sea of 800 steps was built at the monastery, and on the rock that rises from the water near the shore steps were cut to the summit and a stone cross set upon it - from which it has been known as the Rock of the Appearance².

The rock grotto beside the church of Saint George, uncovered in January 1891, was turned in the course of 1892 and 1893 into the cave church of the Nativity of Christ, with a stone narthex built onto it from outside^{2, 3}. The irregular plan of the grotto - in the shape of a flower with four unequal petals - provoked a dispute about its past: the historian Dmitry Strukov held in 1892 that a cave church had stood there in antiquity as well, while Bertier-Delagarde saw in the grotto, in 1910, a former cell or storeroom³. A later academic survey called this "ancient cave church" as much an invention as the millennium itself⁶.

In the days of the jubilee the idea was born of building a cathedral at the house, and on 17 October 1898 Emperor Nicholas II and his consort Alexandra Feodorovna laid it, in honour of the Ascension of the Lord, on the plateau west of the main part of the monastery². In 1908 another grotto was found on the slope below the eastern part of the terrace, which on being cleared proved to be an ancient rock church, but after inspection it was filled in again².

The ancient icon of Saint George has a history of its own⁴. In Bertier-Delagarde's view it belonged to Saint Ignatius (Gazadini), and it began to be venerated as the icon that appeared in 891 only much later: until the middle of the nineteenth century the sources do not connect this image with the rescue of the Greek merchants and do not call it the property of the house⁴. After the resettlement of 1778 the icon was kept in the hierarch's house in Mariupol, and on his death in 1786 it was set above his grave in the old church of Saint Charalampius⁴.

In 1891, in answer to the monastery's request that the icon be returned to Crimea, the Synod ruled that the image should be brought to the house every year for the period from April to 15 October⁴. The byzantinist Nikolai Pokrovsky dated the icon to the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and Bertier-Delagarde to the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries⁴. Since 1965 the image has been kept in the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv, and at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a copy of it was made for the house⁴.

Under Soviet rule the house was reorganised in 1922: the churches and part of the buildings were registered to a community of believers, and the farm to a state farm on which the monks went on living². After the seizure of church valuables, the superior, Hieromonk Ippolit, was arrested and convicted in 1923 for concealing some of them².

In 1927 the church of Saint George was damaged by an earthquake, which was the reason for its dismantling². In 1929 the buildings of the house were handed to a sanatorium and the church of the Nativity of Christ to the Sevastopol museum association, while services were still held in the church of the Exaltation until 1930²; by another account the monastery was liquidated and handed to the resort trust on 29 November 1929, all its churches having been closed since that May⁷.

From 1939 the monastery housed the military and political courses of the Black Sea Fleet, during the Second World War courses for officers and field hospitals, and after the war a military unit².

On 14 September 1991 a metal cross seven metres high was consecrated in the Sevastopol church of Saint Nicholas and taken the same day to the house, where a military helicopter set it on the Rock of the Appearance in place of the lost earlier one - with the blessing of Bishop Vasily of Simferopol and Crimea and at the expense of a benefactor^{2, 7}. The day before, a midshipman had spent several weeks cutting a socket a metre deep in the summit of the rock for the base of the cross².

On 6 May 1993, on the commemoration of Saint George, Archbishop Lazar of Simferopol and Crimea celebrated the Divine Liturgy on the grounds of the house together with the clergy of Sevastopol and thanked the city authorities and the fleet command for their help in returning the monastery to the Church². On 22 July 1993 the statute of the reviving house passed state registration^{2, 7}.

On 30 August 1994 Bishop Lazar appointed Hegumen Augustin, Alexander Polovetsky in the world, as superior of the house². On 27 December 1994 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, having considered the report of Archbishop Lazar, blessed the opening of the male monastery of the holy great-martyr George the Victorious and appointed Hieromonk Augustin (Polovetsky) superior of the house with elevation to the rank of hegumen¹. On 11 June 1995, the day of the Holy Trinity, the first monastic service was held there².

On 2 February 1995 the church of the Twelve Apostles in Balaclava and the church of Saints Constantine and Helen, Equal-to-the-Apostles, in the village of Flotske were made subject to the house; Father Augustin had cared for both of them even before his monastic tonsure on 22 August 1994, while an archpriest^{2, 5}. He organised the restoration of the cave church of the Nativity of Christ, and in 1995 began to revive the Transfiguration skete in the village of Ternivka².

On 13 September 1996 Archimandrite Augustin and his fellow labourer Hieromonk Agapit (Malanich), dean of the Inkerman house, died in a road accident and were buried at the Inkerman monastery^{2, 7}. "The souls of these monks have ripened for the Kingdom of God," said the elder Kirill (Pavlov) at the burial². The book "Sevastopol Deanery" of 1997 calls Father Augustin an ascetic of piety of the end of the twentieth century².

In 2000 the cave chapel of the Iveron icon of the Mother of God beneath the narthex of the church of the Nativity of Christ was restored to the design of Archimandrite Augustin and Hieromonk Agapit³. In the rear wall of the chapel a memorial plaque was set recording the burial of Prince Alexander Golitsyn, formerly Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod and Minister of Public Education; his grave, which had previously been in the church of Saint George, was found during the rebuilding of the church, though by another version it may have belonged to Count Ivan Witte, buried in the same church in 1840³.

On 29 October 2000 the recreation of the church of Saint George began, and it was completed in 2009: built in the forms of classicism, it reproduces outwardly the church of the same dedication that had stood on the spot, while its interior paintings, unlike those of the former church, are executed in imitation of ancient Byzantium^{2, 3}.

The very name of Cape Fiolent has been explained in different ways: as "God's", from the Greek "Theo"; as "the Furious", from the Italian violente, on account of the storms there; or, in Bertier-Delagarde's view, as "the Tiger's", from the Turkish "Filenk-Burun", on account of the alternating bands of yellow limestone and dark trachyte⁵. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the cape was also named after Saint George⁵. And at the end of the eighteenth and in the middle of the nineteenth century some travellers wrongly identified Fiolent with Cape Parthenium from Strabo's "Geography" and with the site of the temple of the goddess Diana from the myth of Iphigenia⁵.