Holy Dormition Monastery

An ancient Christian shrine on the eastern edge of Bakhchysaray, the Holy Dormition Monastery stood at the mouth of the rocky ravine of Mariam-Dere^{1, 4}.

The ravine took its name - the Ravine of Mary - from the monastery's principal church, consecrated in honour of the Dormition of the Most Holy Mother of God⁴. The monastic buildings themselves formed an ensemble on three levels: on the floor of the ravine, on the rock terraces and within the body of the cliffs³.

The first mentions of a church of the Dormition of the Most Holy Mother of God at Salachyk - the eastern suburb of Bakhchysaray, which had the status of a separate settlement, was renamed Starosillia in 1945 and was absorbed into the town in 1954-1968 - belong to the end of the sixteenth century, to 1596 and 1598¹. The first description of the cave church and of the stairs sunk into the body of the rock leading to it, made by E. Dortelli d'Ascoli, is dated 1634¹.

All historical sources of 1596-1783 call the shrine in the Dormition rock a "church" and not a "monastery": for that whole period not one mention of monks and not one name of a superior is known, while several names of the secular clergy are known from the sources¹.

In December 1598 a charter of the Russian tsar Boris Godunov was handed to the representatives of the parish, together with a very considerable stipend - 22 roubles and a poltina in money, an icon of the Most Holy Mother of God and a candlestick; the charter was kept at the church at least until 1681¹. Regular alms from the Muscovite sovereigns are attested by the record documents of 1596, 1598, 1628 and 1681, and the travel notes of the Russian embassy to Crimea of 1625 mention that the envoys, having finished their business with the khan, heard a service of thanksgiving here before the journey back².

On the beginning of the house its own history gives two traditions. The first was written down by the Polish historian Maciej Miechowski in his Treatise on the Two Sarmatias of 1517: a dragon lived in the rock and devoured people and cattle, the Greeks and Italians prayed to the Mother of God for deliverance, saw a candle burning inside the rock, cut steps in the stone and found above an image of the Mother of God, and below it the dragon torn in two².

The figure of that same tradition who vowed thanksgiving to the Mother of God is identified by many, as that same history relates, with Hadji-Girey, the founder of the Crimean Khanate; his mausoleum was raised nearby, where the Mariam-Dere ravine branches off from the valley of the Churuk-Su stream².

The second tradition, recorded in the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century, tells of a shepherd named Mykhailo who pastured the herd of a local princeling and saw on the rock, ten sazhens above the ground, an icon of the Mother of God with a candle burning before it; the icon was twice carried to the prince's house and twice returned to the rock, until a cave for a church was cut in the stone and a stairway to it was built outside². The house's own history gives this tradition after Bishop Hermogen's «Таврическая епархия» (Pskov, 1887), and in M. Protopopov's description of the monastery of 1901 the prince is called the prince of Mangup, that is the ruler of the principality of Theodoro².

The scholarly hypotheses on when the cave monasteries of Crimea arose are retold by that same history without its adopting any of them: in 1914 the historian Yulian Kulakovsky suggested that they appeared in the eighth to ninth centuries, when many monks were leaving Byzantium because of the repressions of the iconoclast government; in the first half of the twentieth century a view took shape according to which the cave monasteries appeared on the peninsula no earlier than the eleventh to twelfth centuries; and in 1993 Oleksandr Herzen and Yurii Moharychev advanced the hypothesis that the Dormition monastery arose from the removal of monks from a house of the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries at Chufut-Kale².

The academic encyclopaedia treats this layer more sharply: the assertions that the house was the residence of the Gothic metropolitans in the time of the Khanate, and that it played an important part in the removal of the Greeks from Crimea in 1778, it calls legends with no support whatever in the sources¹.

The house's own history relates instead that in 1771 Metropolitan Ignatius (Gozadino) arrived at the Gothic and Kaffa see, that he lived from time to time at the Dormition monastery, and that it was from here, on the day of Pascha, 23 April 1778, that he called his flock to resettle; the revealed icon the settlers took with them, and the monastery was left empty².

From 1781 the Greek priest Konstantin Spirandi served in the cave church, kept at Bakhchysaray at the demand of the Christians who had not left the peninsula^{1, 2}. The history of 1908 adds that he came from Antioch to the harbour of Buyuk-Lokbet, and that the Bakhchysaray church of the prophet Elijah collapsed shortly before the departure of the Greeks⁶.

The renewal of the neglected church began at that same time, and the book names those who paid for it: the Bakhchysaray commandant, Colonel Totovich, gave an iconostasis, the military governor, General Kakhovsky, had the royal doors made for it at his own expense, and the church elder Stefan Kaliha enlarged the cave church and built the porch and the balcony⁶.

After the new cathedral of St Nicholas was built at Bakhchysaray in 1800, the Dormition church was subordinated to it, and services were held in it only occasionally, at the request of visitors, by the priests of the cathedral - Spirandi, and later his son Georgii¹. The church itself became a cemetery church⁶.

In 1786-1845 the shrine was visited by no fewer than 29 travellers who published travel notes¹. From their records it is known that the entrance began with open stairs leading from the middle terrace to the upper one, and that from there stairs within the body of the rock gave access to the cave church and to an outer wooden gallery which joined it to the other cave chambers; in the church poorly preserved paintings were noticed, and ornaments hung on the walls, coins among them, beside it there were niches for burials, and on the terraces at the foot of the cliff lay a cemetery at ground level¹. In all these descriptions the object is called a "monastery", in places with the remark that in substance there is only a church here¹.

In 1818 the shrine was visited by Emperor Alexander I, and from that time until 1913 every Russian emperor and numerous members of the house of Romanov came here¹. The history of 1908 preserved a detail of that first visit: the emperor asked Archpriest Spirandi where exactly the icon had appeared, and when the latter led him out onto the balcony and showed him the place, he ordered a ladder and a candle to be brought, climbed up to the image and with his own hand fixed a burning candle before it in the stone wall⁷.

In 1849 the newly appointed Archbishop of Kherson and Tavrida, Innokentii (Borisov), petitioned the authorities for the "restoration" - in fact the founding - of monastic life here in the form of a skete¹. The plan provided for a smaller complement of monks than the standards of the day required, and for self-financing: the skete was to exist on the means of benefactors and by its own labour, without state funding¹.

According to the book of 1908, the bishop drew up this project for the most significant of the deserted holy places of the Crimean mountains, with monastic life established in them "after the order and likeness of the holy mountain of Athos", and designated the Dormition rock for the principal skete, with the right of superintending the remaining kinoviyas that were to be opened elsewhere⁸.

The decree founding the skete on those terms was signed on 4 May 1850, and already on 15 August of the same year the solemn opening took place¹.

A description of the day itself was preserved by the same book. Archbishop Innokentii arrived on 13 August, on the 14th the Greek Metropolitan Agathangel came from Sevastopol, and the all-night vigil was held, because the church was too cramped, on the platform before it: it began in the fifth hour and continued after sunset, in the darkness of the night lit only by the candles of the pilgrims⁹.

The next morning a procession of the cross set out from the town cathedral, and its chief adornment was an icon of the Dormition of the Mother of God sent from the Kyiv Caves Lavra as a blessing upon the new Crimean house; after the liturgy, celebrated by Metropolitan Agathangel, two hierarchs raised a wooden cross with an inscription recording the time of the opening⁹. Among the gifts of that day the book names an icon of the Saviour with 84 particles of relics, sent by the Korsun Mother of God monastery, and a cross of three woods - cypress, pine and cedar¹¹.

On the day of the opening the skete had only the cave church and three cave cells¹¹. Through the second half of the nineteenth century it was built up intensively: there arose the churches of the Holy Equals-to-the-Apostles Constantine and Helen (1857), of St Mark (1859), of St George (1875) and of St Innokentii of Irkutsk (1896), the superior's house (1862), cells, a refectory, a hotel and outbuildings, the stairs from the middle terrace to the upper one were crowned by a belfry of 1850, and within the body of the rock stairs were cut leading to the plateau above the ravine¹.

The book of 1908 names the donors one by one. The cave church of the Apostle and Evangelist Mark was cut in the rock below the Dormition church at the expense of the Simferopol official Mark Aivazov, and above it, in a chamber hewn out of the rock, the sacristy and the library were arranged^{12, 3}.

The church of Sts Constantine and Helen beneath the rock was built at her own expense and with rare zeal by Yelyzaveta Berkova, the daughter of a collegiate assessor; she also gave the skete a metochion at Simferopol, and after her death in 1878 she was buried in the rock near this church¹². The fifth church, of St Innokentii of Irkutsk, was raised in 1896 under the superior Archimandrite Isidor on the donations of Martynian, Archbishop of Tavrida and Simferopol¹².

In that same year, 1896, the ancient underground water conduit was restored: water from a spring a verst up the ravine was led by iron pipes into a stone basin made in the shape of a chapel crowned with a cross, and from there into the skete, where a fountain was set up on the middle platform in the form of a vase hewn from a single stone with a copper cross in its middle¹³. To the top of the rock led a stairway of 83 steps cut in the rock itself¹³.

In 1853 the Anastasia kinoviya on the river Kacha, eight versts away, was attached to the skete¹⁴; according to the house's own history, the plot of Kachi-Kalyon together with its house church of the Holy Martyr Anastasia the Deliverer from Bonds was given to the Dormition monastery under the will of the landowner H. Khvytskyi in 1851⁵.

In 1854-1855, during the Crimean War, a military hospital was housed in the skete, and in the cemetery were buried the generals P. Vrevskyi and P. Veimarn, who fell in the battle on the Chorna river on 4 August 1855¹. In the spring of 1944 a hospital again stood in the house³.

By the time the book of 1908 appeared, the skete, the Anastasia kinoviya attached to it and the Simferopol metochion counted 60 brethren¹⁴, and over the first fifty years the house had been governed, by its own reckoning, by thirteen superiors¹⁰.

On the slope at the foot of the north-eastern cliff there remained cave structures - the remnants of the village of Mariampolis, the "city of Mary"; documentary evidence of this settlement belongs only to the late Middle Ages, while archaeologists date its origin no earlier than the eighth to ninth centuries³. The inhabitants of the village, among them the forebears of the painter A. I. Kuindzhi, left it during the resettlement of 1778, and Mariupol, founded by the Greek settlers in the northern Azov region, inherited the name of that village community³. In pilgrims' descriptions the house itself was compared with the monasteries of Sts Sabbas the Sanctified and George Hozevite near Jerusalem, on account of the similar landscape³.

After Soviet power was established in Crimea the skete was closed in 1921 and turned into the Artem colony, all its valuables being confiscated, among them about 2.7 million roubles in money and 18.5 kg of silver articles¹. The faithful more than once petitioned for one of the churches to be handed over to them, but the authorities invariably refused¹.

In 1927, on the day of the Dormition of the Most Holy Mother of God, a popular disturbance took place here: the faithful tried to occupy the churches by force and were dispersed by the militia¹. After that incident the authorities set about destroying the skete more insistently, and in 1928 all the churches except the cave one, and the belfry as well, were dismantled¹. The house's own history, by contrast, links the loss of the buildings to the earthquake of 1927².

After the Bakhchysaray Historical and Cultural Preserve was formed in 1955 the ruined skete was included in it, and in 1965-1966 restoration work was carried out in the Dormition church¹.

On 8 June 1993 the Council for Religious Affairs under the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine adopted a decision on the restoration of the monastery¹. The new building was carried out to new designs, unconnected with the building of the second half of the nineteenth century¹

The belfry above the stairs was rebuilt in the middle of the 1990s in forms close to the original ones; at the same time a row of cells and offices built against the rock was re-created on the site of the old cells, and the church of St Mark was restored by building against the rock the wall that had been lost in Soviet times³. The church of Sts Constantine and Helen was rebuilt at the beginning of the twenty-first century on the site of the structure of 1857, and in 2000 the blocks of a psychoneurological boarding home of the mid-twentieth century were handed over to the monastery, when the medical institution was moved elsewhere³.

The academic encyclopaedia notes that the house was informally called a "lavra" and the "Crimean Athos"¹ - an echo of the plan with which everything began in 1850.