Hrusheve St. Michael the Archangel's Monastery

The exact date of the foundation of Hrusheve St. Michael the Archangel's Monastery, which stands in the village of Hrusheve in the Tyachiv district, is not known³. The earliest reports of the house go back to 1242: after the horde had withdrawn, the monks complained in writing to King Béla IV of Hungary that during the raid the monastery had been plundered, that monks had been killed and that all their documents and charters had been lost^{3, 12}. Scholars differ over the time of the foundation - some place it in the late ninth and the tenth centuries, others suppose the twelfth or the beginning of the thirteenth century, and others again the middle of the fourteenth century¹².

In the second half of the fourteenth century the house was taken into the care of the Wallachian voivodes Balk (Balytsia) and Drah, who had received large holdings in Maramureș for their service to the Hungarian crown; they built a new church and provided the monks with everything they needed¹². At their wish, on 13 August 1391 Patriarch Anthony IV of Constantinople granted the monastery stauropegia and appointed its hegumen Pakhomii exarch, the patriarch's deputy^{3, 12}. Under the charter the exarch was to oversee the clergy and the people and received the right to consecrate churches in the patriarch's name, and after his death the monks together with the voivodes were to elect a new hegumen without the consent of the bishop of Mukachevo; the patriarch's name was to be commemorated at every service, both in the monastery and in the churches subject to it¹².

Drah died in 1402 and Balk in 1404; in that same year Balk's sons Dmytro and Oleksandr, by a charter written in Church Slavonic, gave the house an estate and three villages with a mill - Hrusheve, Kryvyi and Teresva^{12, 13}. The publication «Легенди Карпат» calls this charter one of the oldest monuments of Rusyn writing¹³. The monastery's own site states that the house then held more than six thousand hectares of land³. The centre of learning in it was a library of Church Slavonic literature together with a theological and a common school, where priests and deacons and part of the nobility studied and where Slavonic books were copied¹².

In time the monastery lost its patrons: the family of Drah took the name Drágfi and exchanged its estates in Maramureș for others in Hungary, and the villages that had been given to the house passed away from it¹². In 1494 hegumen Ilarion appeared before the king in person, showed him the Greek charter of Patriarch Anthony written on parchment together with its Latin translation, and asked him to confirm it; the king agreed¹². The sources differ over when the house was subordinated to the bishop of Mukachevo and by whom: by one account it was King Vladislaus II of Hungary in 1491, by another Prince Stephen Báthory of Transylvania in 1556^{13, 12}.

A separate and still unsettled dispute concerns the monastery's printing press. The house's own site asserts that it was here, at the end of the fifteenth century, that the first book in the world printed in Church Slavonic appeared - the Oktoikh of Prince Crnojević of 1493, which can now be seen at the Metropolia of Cetinje³. The publication «Легенди Карпат» writes instead that the tradition that Švajpolt Fiol moved his press to Hrusheve is supported by nothing at all and that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there was certainly no press at the monastery, while assigning a real monastic press to the middle of the seventeenth century, when by the efforts and at the expense of Prince George I Rákóczi of Transylvania the first Wallachian book, a translation of the New Testament, was published here¹³. A regional study adds that a manuscript Oktoikh originating from the Hrusheve monastery is kept in the holdings of the Zakarpattia Regional Museum, and that no concrete documents of the existence of a press have survived, so that a number of scholars do not agree with this view¹².

In the years of the religious wars the monastery repeatedly became the residence of the Orthodox bishop of Mukachevo: the eparchy was governed from there around 1558 and then again in 1607¹². The sources do not agree on the date of the monastery's destruction. Its own site writes of two devastations in the seventeenth century - by Calvinist Protestants at the beginning of the century and by Catholics at its end³. The regional sources describe instead a single destruction of unsettled date: in 1657 by Poles led by Prince Lubomirski, who invaded Zakarpattia in pursuit of Prince George II Rákóczi of Transylvania, or by Protestants in 1670, or during the rising of Imre Thököly in the 1690s, or by Catholics^{12, 13}. The monks who survived settled in other places¹². As the house's own site writes, it waited more than three hundred years for its revival³.

In 1991, on the site of the monastery and with the blessing of Archbishop Yevfymii of Mukachevo and Uzhhorod, a cross was raised in memory of the five-hundredth anniversary of book printing, and on 7 July the Divine Liturgy was solemnly served there³. In September 1997 excavations began on the grounds of the house, at the initiative of scholars of Uzhhorod National University and of scholars from Romania: part of the foundation, the remains of the church and nine burials of monks were uncovered³. In the course of 1997-1998 archaeologists found here the ruins of a stone church and of wooden buildings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the foundation of the ancient church is from one to one and a half metres wide, traces of frescoes can be seen in places, and marks of violence remain on the skeletons - an arrowhead was found in one of the skulls¹². The Hust Diocese reported the same finds, human remains and a skull with the fragment of an arrowhead, in 2013⁷.

The new house was laid out beside the remains of the old one, at the very top of the village¹². In 1998-2004 the rector of the Annunciation church of the village of Hrusheve, archpriest Mykhailo (Dupin), together with his parishioners built a small church here³. On 26 July 2004 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, having heard the report of Bishop Ioann of Hust and Vynohradiv, blessed by journal No. 18 the opening of the Hrusheve St. Michael the Archangel's Convent in the village of Hrusheve¹, and on 13 July 2006 it blessed by journal No. 34 the conversion of that convent into a men's monastery². The thought of the revival arose with archimandrite Stratonik (Lehach) in conversation with the ruling hierarch, and it was his petitioning at the Synod that led to this decision; despite his seventy years he took up the labour of reviving the house³. In the course of eleven years two residential buildings and a church carrying a belfry and bells were put up at the monastery³.

In the house are kept the icon of the Mother of God "Vsetsarytsia", brought from the Monastery of St. Panteleimon on Mount Athos, an icon of St. Nicholas brought from the city of Bari, particles of the relics of the Kyiv Caves saints, and also the remains of monks killed during the destruction of the monastery in the seventeenth century and found during the building of the church⁴. The objects found during the excavations are kept in the monastery church¹². On 11 June 2020, with the blessing of Metropolitan Mark of Hust and Vynohradiv, the Divine Liturgy at the monastery was led by Metropolitan Feodor, who administers the Mukachevo Diocese, and before the beginning of the liturgy the rite of the consecration of a new altar was performed¹¹.

Besides the Synaxis of the Archangel Michael and the other Bodiless Powers of Heaven and the Miracle of the Archangel Michael at Chonae, the house keeps the feasts of the Nativity of John the Baptist and of the icons of the Mother of God "Ekonomissa" and "Skoroposlushnytsia"⁵. The veneration of the "Skoroposlushnytsia" is bound up with the service of 22 November 2013, when Archbishop Mark of Hust and Vynohradiv served here on the day of that icon and proposed that the feast be kept at the monastery every year; on the same day two ordinations, to the priesthood and to the diaconate, were performed in the house, and the ordinands had been prepared at this monastery⁷. At that same time missionary readings and lectures began to be held here, to which students of the Kyiv Theological Seminary and priests from the surrounding parishes were invited: after the Sunday service there was a common meal and after it talks, the first of which were devoted to the Bible⁸.

On 3 November 2016 the Conference of the pilgrimage services of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was held in the assembly hall of the monastery; as the Information and Education Department of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church reported, for the first time in the history of these gatherings the forum took place not in Kyiv but on the territory of an eparchy^{9, 10}. It was opened by Metropolitan Mark of Hust and Vynohradiv, and among its organisers was archimandrite Pimen (Matsola), the dean of the house and the head of the pilgrimage department of the Hust Diocese, to whom the idea of holding the gathering in Zakarpattia belonged^{9, 10}. The monastery's own site publishes an order of akathists in which every day of the week has its own akathists⁶.