Svyatogirsk Holy Dormition Lavra

The Holy Dormition Sviatohirsk Lavra stands in the town of Sviatohirsk in the Donetsk region, ten kilometres from the E40/M03 highway, between Izium and Sloviansk¹². At first the whole monastery was housed in caves cut into the chalk hill: in the seventeenth century this cave complex had at least four tiers of chambers, and in 1637 a Dormition cathedral church was arranged in the upper part of the hill¹.

The monastery's own account traces its origin to the eighth or ninth century, and the house itself presents this as a supposition drawn from archaeology and from comparison with other cave monasteries, not as a documented date². The Holy Mountains are mentioned in documents from 1526, and the Sviatohirsk monastery for the first time in a 1624 royal charter of landholdings¹.

In the 1670s the monks put up a wooden church of Saints Peter and Paul below the hill on the river bank; the house was surrounded by fortress walls, kept artillery and served as a forward fortified post on the edge of the Wild Field. In 1679 Tatars seized and devastated the monastery, but it was quickly rebuilt, and after the Azov-Dnipro campaigns of 1695-1696 it lost its strategic importance¹.

The collapse of the upper part of the rock at the end of the seventeenth century led to the building, in 1698-1708, of a masonry Dormition cathedral above ground at the expense of F. Shydlovskyi, colonel of the Izium regiment, and to the remains of the old cave church being rebuilt as the church of St Nicholas¹. In 1786, during the secularisation, the monastery was closed and its property and lands passed to the state treasury¹. The scale of those lands is visible in the surveys of the end of the century: in 1795 the estate held 550 households with 3,134 peasants living in them, and in 1797 it consisted of 25,000 desiatynas of land, including 9,860 desiatynas of arable and 10,000 of forest³.

After the death of Prince Grigory Potemkin in 1791 the Sviatohirsk holding passed by inheritance to his nephew, General Engelhardt³. Attempts to restore the house long came to nothing: in 1826 Emperor Nicholas I ordered the ruins to be surveyed, on 15 April 1836 the Holy Synod directed that the possibility of restoration be examined, but on the report of the bishop of Kharkiv an order followed on 12 May 1837 that no restoration would take place, because the owner of the lands would not donate them; in 1841 part of the underground passage at the entrance to the caves collapsed³.

In 1844 the house was restored under the name of the Sviatohirsk Dormition Hermitage - by order of Emperor Nicholas I and according to the rule and typikon of the Hlynska Hermitage^{1, 4}. As its first superior the Holy Synod appointed the treasurer of the Hlynska Hermitage, hieromonk Arsenii, later an archimandrite; he came here with twelve monks, and great help was given by a local landowner, Count O. Potemkin, and his wife^{1, 4}. Archimandrite Arsenii died on 12/25 October 1859⁴.

There followed the Protection church with its bell tower (1850) to a design by A. Ton, to which the hegumen's house was added the next year, and the Dormition cathedral (1859-1868) to a design by O. Hornostaiev, 53 metres high to the cross; in 1864 the Transfiguration church, which has not survived, was raised on Mount Tabor, in 1877 a hotel, and in 1887 two cell blocks¹. On 9 August 1861 the hermitage received Empress Maria Alexandrovna and her children⁴. I. Repin, F. Tiutchev, I. Bunin, V. Nemyrovych-Danchenko, M. Tsvetaieva and D. Bahalii all stayed at the monastery, and in the spring of 1887 A. Chekhov lived here¹.

On 8 July 1922 the authorities began open pressure on the brotherhood, demanding that it leave the house at once⁴; the monastery was liquidated the same year¹. On 21 October 1922 it was resolved to hand the former monastery over for a rest home, which, despite an opening promised for December, only began work in May 1923; in 1925 separate boarding houses began to be set up in the surrounding woods, and in 1927 a monument to Artem was raised on one of the hills⁵. In those years hieromonk Melchizedek (Soloviov) and the hieromartyr Paisii (Moskot) were shot from among the Sviatohirsk brotherhood⁵. Hieromonk Ioann (Strieltsov) was arrested for the first time in 1931, then again in 1937 and 1949, and on 11/24 September 1970, having risen from his sickbed, he served his last Divine Liturgy⁵.

In June 1942, under German occupation, the monks resolved to reopen the house, but by the end of March 1943 they were ordered to leave it⁵. Buildings damaged in the war were rebuilt over 1947-1956, the first conservation work was carried out in 1969-1973, the church of St Nicholas was restored in 1973-1979, and in 1980 the monastic ensemble was taken into the Sviatohirsk state historical and architectural reserve¹; in May 1955 a sanatorium was opened on the monastery grounds⁵.

In November 1991 the Donetsk regional executive committee resolved to transfer the monastery buildings into the ownership of the eparchy; on 15 July 1992 the first brotherhood arrived at the house - eight men - on 20 August of the same year the first liturgy was served in the Dormition cathedral, and on 4 October the Sviatohirsk icon of the Mother of God was brought back here in procession⁶. In 1997 bells rang at the house once more - seventeen of them⁶ - and in 2000 the cave churches were handed over to the monastery⁶.

By a decision of the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of 9 March 2004 the monastery was given the status of a lavra⁷; on 18 September of the same year a monument to the Mother of God was set up at the entrance to the house⁷. On 20 December 2008 the Holy Synod blessed the opening of the Lavra's metochion in honour of St Theodosius of Chernihiv in the village of Karmazynivka in the Luhansk region⁹.

Venerable Ioann the Recluse, Ivan Kriukov in the world, was born in 1795 in Kursk and died on 24 August 1867⁴; on 24 August 1995 the Church numbered him among the saints^{4, 8}. On 11-12 July 2008 sixteen more fathers of the house, who had laboured in the Holy Mountains in the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, were glorified; together they form the Synaxis of the Sviatohirsk saints, the relics of eleven of whom rest in the Dormition cathedral, and the day of their common celebration - 24 September - is set to the day of the memory of Venerable Ioann (Strieltsov)⁸.

The house receives pilgrims: lodging in the pilgrims' hotel is given for up to three days, admission is through the registry on production of identity documents, and the cost of staying is a donation¹⁰. Meals at the monastery are free and served twice a day: dinner in the pilgrims' refectory at 12:00, and on Sundays and feast days after the service, with supper following the evening service¹¹.