Kyiv Holy Dormition Caves Lavra

The Holy Dormition Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra stands in the historic centre of Kyiv, on two high hills of the right bank of the Dnipro and in the hollow between them; its ensemble of 28 hectares numbers more than a hundred and twenty buildings and is divided into the Upper Lavra and the compositionally subordinate Lower Lavra, which is in turn formed by the ensembles of the Far Caves, the Near Caves and the Hostynnyi Dvir¹.

By the chronicle tradition, 1051 is held to be the year in which the cave monastery of the Dormition of the Most Holy Mother of God was founded^{1, 2}. Around 1062 Venerable Antonii appointed Venerable Varlaam as its first hegumen and himself withdrew into a cave on another hill^{2, 3}.

Under Venerable Feodosii the house adopted the Studite typikon: a monk was sent to Constantinople for it, and this cenobitic rule was later taken up by the monasteries of Kyivan Rus³. The monastery is bound up with early chronicle writing as well - around 1113 Venerable Nestor the Chronicler completed the Tale of Bygone Years, and in the first quarter of the thirteenth century the Kyiv Caves Paterikon was compiled here, built on the accounts of the monk Polikarp and the epistles of Bishop Simon³.

The caves themselves, from which the house takes its name, form two underground labyrinths of tunnels, cells and catacombs dug in sandstone and loess: about a metre and a half wide, up to two metres high, and the Near and Far Caves lie some four hundred metres apart⁶. The monastery's best-known holy things were the relics of its ascetics, canonised in 1643 by Metropolitan Petro Mohyla⁶. The house keeps its own register of its saints, among them Agapit the unmercenary physician (eleventh century), Alipii the icon painter (1065-1114), Illia of Murom (d. 1188) and the twelve masters who built the Great Church⁴.

The masonry Dormition cathedral was raised in the 1070s^{1, 2}; in 1091 the relics of Venerable Feodosii were laid in it³. In 1169 the monastery received the title of lavra and became an archimandrite's house^{1, 2}, and in 1592 it received from the Patriarch of Constantinople a confirmation of its stauropegion and of the dignity of a lavra² - it held that stauropegion until 1688¹.

The earthquake of 1230 damaged the monastery buildings, and in 1240 the invasion destroyed the defensive walls; after the ruin of the Dormition cathedral the Holy Trinity gate church became for a time the principal church of the house¹. In 1470, under the rule of Prince Semen Olelkovych, the Dormition cathedral was restored, and in 1482 the monastery buildings were destroyed by the Tatars of Khan Mengli Giray I¹.

Around 1615, under Archimandrite Yelysei Pletenetsky, a printing house was established here^{1, 2}; the oldest of its books to survive is the Chasoslovets of 1616-1617³, and in 1631 Metropolitan Petro Mohyla founded a school at the Lavra¹. Under Archimandrite Inokentii (Gizel), who led the house in 1656-1683, the press issued the Kyiv Caves Paterikon (1661) and the Synopsis (1674) - the first textbook of the country's history, which went through thirty editions across the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries².

In the second half of the seventeenth century the Lavra became a strategically important fortress: in 1696-1701, at the expense of Hetman Ivan Mazepa, the territory of the Upper Lavra was enclosed by defensive walls with five corner towers and the All Saints gate church¹. Colonel K. Mokiievskyi built the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God at the Far Caves (1696), and Colonel P. Hertsyk the church of the Elevation of the Cross at the Near Caves (1700-1704), where he was also buried; in 1706-1723 the monastery and the ground around it were enclosed in a half-ring of earthen bastions of the Kyiv Caves fortress².

On the night of 22 April 1718 a fire broke out which destroyed every wooden structure and damaged the masonry ones¹; a large part of the monastery library burned too, and its restoration began on the initiative of Archimandrite Ioannykii (Seniutovych)². Hetman Ivan Skoropadskyi gave five thousand roubles towards restoring the cathedral and the belfry, and together with the Cossack regiments donated more than fifty thousand zloty to the rebuilding². On the site of the burnt wooden belfry the masonry Great Lavra Belfry was raised in 1731-1744, 96.5 metres high - the tallest historic monumental structure in Ukraine. It was built to a design by J. G. Schädel, who reworked and extended the design drawn up in 1720 by F. Vasyliev, and the Ukrainian masters S. Kovnir, Y. Rubashevskyi and I. Horokh worked on it; it is an eight-sided four-tier tower 28.8 metres across at the base, with walls 8 metres thick and a granite foundation reaching seven metres down¹.

After the secularisation of 1786 the Lavra passed into the direct charge of the Synod with an establishment of a hundred monks and a hundred servants, and the metropolitans of Kyiv became its sacred archimandrites². A pilgrims' house and a hospital operated at the monastery, which took in up to eighty thousand pilgrims a year³. In 1860 a two-class public school was opened here, admitting up to 130-140 children by 1914³. As of 1917 the Lavra held 3,161 desiatynas of land, a brickworks, a steam mill, a sawmill, a printing house with a lithography and a type foundry, bookbinding, painting, gilding, joinery and blacksmith-locksmith workshops, book and icon shops and two hospitals². In 1908-1909 a separate building was raised on the monastery grounds for the great library of Metropolitan Flavian².

On 29 September 1926 the Lavra was declared a state historical and cultural reserve^{1, 3}; the monastic community went on existing as an artil until 1929¹, and at the beginning of 1930 the monastery was liquidated and its brotherhood exiled or shot³. On 3 November 1941, in circumstances never finally established, the Dormition cathedral was blown up². At the end of that same year monastic life resumed on the territory of the Near Caves on the initiative of Schema-Archbishop Antonii², whom the house venerates among its saints as a confessor⁴; in 1945 the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God, the belfry and the sacristy at the Far Caves were returned to the monastery, and in 1946 it was assigned 5.25 hectares, eight buildings and four churches with belfries².

On 28 February 1961 the Kyiv city executive committee resolved to terminate its agreements with the monastery, and the whole territory of the Lavra was placed under the reserve²; in the late 1950s, on the instruction of party bodies, the ancient wells of Venerables Antonii and Feodosii were filled in³. The return began at the end of the 1980s: in 1988 the ensemble of the Far Caves - sixteen structures - was handed to the monastic community, and on 28 April 1990 the Near Caves, nineteen of them². In that same year of 1990 the Lavra ensemble was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List¹, and the Dormition cathedral was rebuilt at state expense in 1998-2000¹.

The chief holy thing of the Dormition cathedral was the icon of the Dormition of the Mother of God, brought, by tradition, by the builders from Constantinople. It was painted in ancient Greek lettering on a cypress board 40 centimetres wide and 29 high; the Gospel book shown on the icon covered an opening inside the board in which particles of the relics of seven martyrs were kept. The icon was set into a great gilded silver ring which was lowered daily on silk cords, after matins and the liturgy, so that pilgrims could kiss it⁵.