An ascetic's holiday: A month at the Holy Dormition Monastery in Univ
The discovery late last year of a clandestine 1947 letter from the imprisoned Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj in a wall at the Holy Dormition Monastery at Univ spotlights this institution's role in some of the more dramatic phases of Ukrainian history. In his two-part article, Andrew Sorokowski reflects on a summer sojourn at Univ, describing the life of this remarkable community and its interconnections with Ukraine's political, social, economic and cultural life over the past six centuries.
by Andrew Sorokowski
CONCLUSION
World War I took its toll on the Studites. Many were drafted into the Austrian army while others, suspected of Russian sympathies, were sent to internment camps. But it was during the Polish-Ukrainian war that followed the fall of Austria-Hungary in late 1918 that the Sknyliv monastery was destroyed, first by fire, then by military operations. As a result, in 1919 Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky decided to transfer the Studites to Univ. With western Ukraine again under Polish rule, the metropolitan's brother, Archimandrite Klymentii Sheptytsky, concentrated on building monastic life in the Byzantine tradition. A revised Studite rule was developed on the basis of historical sources and approved in 1936-1937.
Today, one must be at least 18 years old to enter the monastery; formerly the age was 16. Every year an average of some 20 young men announce their candidacies, but few remain for long. Before World War II, they came mostly from the villages; now many come from the city. Although a few of them are considerably older than 18, most are young. About half wear beards.
The routine is demanding. Each monk devotes about eight hours a day to prayer and a similar length of time to agricultural or other physical labor, leaving the remaining eight hours for rest or sleep. They work in staggered shifts, so that there are always enough monks to pray and to work.
Nevertheless, there is time to pursue special interests. Some of the monks explore the vast and varied heritage of Eastern Christian liturgical chant, borrowing melodies for their choral services from the Bulgarian, Russian and Serbian traditions. One of the monks, Brother Andrii, took an interest in Byzantine bell-ringing. On late afternoons one could see him aloft in the belfry, trying out some exotic melodic pattern. Later I heard that he had enrolled in the Lviv Conservatory of Music.
In a relatively poor, post-Communist country like Ukraine, maintaining the monastic economy takes considerable skill. The monks do much of their work beyond the monastery walls. Upon its revival by Metropolitan Sheptytsky in 1919, the Holy Dormition Monastery could not derive rents from far-flung landholdings, as in feudal times. In order to survive the monks had to work in the adjacent orchards, fields and buildings.
In the 1920s and 1930s the monastery became a model of economic self-sufficiency, based on farming and gardening with up-to-date technology. The monks herded cows and raised horses. They gathered honey from a hundred beehives and tended a vineyard. They dyed wool and tanned hides in the winter. The monks processed flax into linen towels and tablecloths. The monastery operated two mills, a smithy, and workshops producing baskets and furniture. Shops housed a tailor, a cobbler and a locksmith.
Naturally, the monastic economy also addressed the spiritual needs of the laity: the monks crafted rosaries and, in the renovated print-shop, produced popular religious publications, as well as reproductions of the monastery icons, which would be sold at religious festivals. The Studites did not neglect their lay neighbors' health or education either: they operated an orphanage and a primary school, and their physician and assistant would serve the villagers as well as the monks.
After the war the Soviet authorities confiscated most of the monastic land between the forest and the village road. Today it remains part of the local collective farm. Many collectives in Ukraine have survived the end of official communism, as privatization is slow and difficult. The monastery has retained a few buildings beyond its walls, however, and some patches of surrounding land. Here the monks perform their agricultural labor.
Yet the monks find time to counsel the laity. One warm evening after an outdoor vesper service the students and teachers met indoors with the young hieromonk Father Illya. To crashes of thunder and flashes of lightning, he recounted how after his stint in the Soviet Army he had first felt a calling to the priesthood. An elderly monk of his acquaintance had prayed daily for his vocation, and finally he had answered it. Father Illya invited us to recite the Jesus prayer before an icon. As the storm raged outside, the electricity went out, leaving us only the light of a single candle before the icon. Someone lit a second candle and, as we prayed, the lightning briefly illuminated us.
Later Father Illya took questions. Trust absolutely in divine providence, he counselled. Accept the situation in which God places you, even if it seems wrong or unjust. It was a hard lesson for us to swallow - particularly for one brought up in a culture where we are encouraged to question authority and assert our rights, to live as we want to live and to be who we want to be. Choice, not acceptance, is the watchword of the West.
Another time we met with Father Alexander, who mystified us with stories of the magic spells and witchcraft that had survived among the Hutsuls in the Carpathian Mountains. Some of the students were skeptical, seeing little danger in such folkloric relics of the past. But Father Alexander took it all quite seriously.
Later I talked with Father Hedeon, an elderly hieromonk with a long white beard. Ordained in Rome in the late 1930s by the Russian Catholic Bishop Ievreinov, he had studied at the Gregorian University. Father Hedeon had returned to Univ in the fateful year of 1939. One September day a forward detachment of the Red Army appeared in the village. The Soviet Union, dividing Poland with Nazi Germany under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of the previous month, claimed to be liberating the Ukrainian people from the Poles, the landlords, the Church, the bourgeoisie and other "exploiters." The officers had heard that the monks were harboring arms. They arrested the abbot and stood him up against the wall of the belfry for execution. At that moment Father Hedeon appeared with some Belgian fowling-pieces. Pleased with this stylish booty, the officers abandoned the proceedings and resumed their journey of liberation.
This was only the beginning of the monastery's troubles. For while the Soviet authorities, careful not to alienate the population, treated the clergy circumspectly, they did not hesitate to appropriate church property. They nationalized part of the monastery's fields, woods and pastures, seized the cattle, and requisitioned the harvested crops. As one villager later recollected, the Soviets sat the poorest of the villagers atop wagons loaded with grain to sing songs of freedom and equality. In October 1939 a nearby monastic chronicler noted that it was precisely those villagers who had benefited from the generosity of the monks who now pillaged the monastery with the accusation "You've drunk enough of our blood!" The Soviet authorities settled Polish refugees in some of the cells and opened a basket-weaving workshop. By 1940 the monks, deprived of resources, were beginning to go hungry. Villagers who had received land confiscated from the monastery secretly sent them food.
Then came June 22, 1941, and the German attack on the USSR. As the Red Army retreated eastward before the advancing Wehrmacht, the Soviet secret police made sure to leave its mark, murdering three of the monks. In another village, a Studite monk was dragged through the streets before being tossed into a ditch and bayoneted to death.
During the subsequent occupation, the archimandrite and hegumen maintained contact with the Ukrainian nationalist resistance - a policy that risked Nazi reprisals and would also condemn them in the eyes of the Soviet regime. Moreover, the Studite monks harbored three Jewish boys, sons of rabbis from Lviv and Poznan, in their orphanage. This was part of Metropolitan Sheptytskyi's successful plan to save Jewish children by hiding them in various monasteries. Aside from confiscating a bell, however, the German authorities left the monastery alone. But the German priest Josef Peters, who had earlier lived at Univ as a Studite monk, was arrested by the Gestapo in Lviv for printing illegal leaflets and sent to the Dachau concentration camp.
In the summer of 1944 the German army was in retreat. With the Red Army once again in charge, the monks continued to maintain clandestine contact with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, providing it with food, shelter and medical assistance, and even harboring its commander-in-chief, Gen. Roman Shukhevych, for a few days. On September 30 Soviet security troops and tanks mounted an anti-insurgency operation in the forests near Monks' Hill. One detachment took the monastery. But for the time being, the Soviets would not directly assault the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church.
Historians have not yet established why. Perhaps the Soviet leaders wanted to secure their grip on western Ukraine - and more broadly, on Eastern Europe - before assaulting the Church. Perhaps they were reluctant to harm the immensely popular Metropolitan Sheptytsky. Perhaps they thought the Church could be pressured into collaborating against the nationalist underground. In any case, after Metropolitan Sheptytsky's death on November 1, 1944, a Church delegation travelled to Moscow seeking an accommodation with the Soviets. Despite some good-will gestures, in early 1945 the Soviet government prepared a plan to liquidate the Church. They would do so by joining it to the recently revived and politically compliant Russian Orthodox Church.
In April 1945 the entire Greek-Catholic hierarchy in Soviet-occupied Halychyna, including the new Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj, was arrested. The following March, the press announced that the bishops would be tried for treason. A few days later, a group of clergy and laymen, many of them bused in from the countryside, was herded into St. George's Cathedral in Lviv, where the Church was formally dissolved and "reunited" with the Orthodox.
In the ensuing months and years, recalcitrant priests (many of whom had wives and children) were shipped off for hard labor to Central Asia or Siberia. During this operation, the Holy Dormition Monastery at Univ served as a collection point for monks from the various monasteries being dissolved throughout the region. While the Soviet authorities had plenty of experience in liquidating Churches - they had practically destroyed the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1920s-1930s - their knowledge of religious affairs was faulty: in a 1946 report the regional plenipotentiary of the Council for Religious Cults referred to the Studites as "students." The Soviets' talents lay elsewhere. According to some of the monks, one can still find the bones of prisoners who were shot in the monastery basement.
In June 1947 Archimandrite Klymentii Sheptytsky was arrested. The villagers relate that he was paraded through Univ in an open truck, flanked by two armed soldiers. He only managed to bow to the people standing in their front yards and to bless the village. His detention and investigation lasted until February of the following year, when he was convicted of "treason to the fatherland" and sentenced to eight years' imprisonment. He died in June 1951 in the Vladimir Prison in Russia. A number of other monks, all of whom refused to convert to Russian Orthodoxy, were imprisoned or sent to labor camps.
Archimandrite Klymentii Sheptytsky was beatified by Pope John Paul II during his visit to Lviv on June 27, 2001, along with 26 other Ukrainian Greek-Catholic martyrs.
In 1948, Father Hedeon was arrested for rendering aid to the Ukrainian anti-Soviet underground. He was exiled to the far eastern region of Russia. After his return from exile he was allowed to serve a village parish - in the Russian Orthodox Church, of course.
It was only in September 1950, however, that the final assault on the Holy Dormition Monastery took place. It began with a thorough search of the premises. Books, paintings and other valuables were confiscated. "Harmless" or "useless" tomes were tossed into the church. But the villagers of Univ were able to hide some of the monastery's treasures from the Soviet police. For example, one family hid a precious Gospel in the ceiling of a corridor in their home. Today, many of these artifacts can be seen in an art gallery on the premises. It contains a remarkable collection of ecclesiastical folk art, including icons in the native village style. There is also a collection of antimensions, embroidered altar-cloths containing relics and inscribed by the reigning hierarch.
Once the monks were driven out, the monastery was converted into a residence for invalids, then into a women's psychiatric hospital. Later the inmates were joined by homeless people and ex-prisoners from around the country. In December 1952 the Soviets poured gasoline on the remaining books and burned them. Next, one Kochenkov, secretary of the Communist Party's local district committee, ordered that the church be turned into a cultural and recreational center.
The following spring, the employees of the residence were compelled to demolish the 18th-century iconostasis; the inmates were given the fragments to use as firewood. As the monks relate, a movie screen was placed at the altar. To heat the premises, an iron stove was plunked down in the middle of the nave, and a chimney was thrust through the ceiling. The frescoes were not spared either. They had been painted, with professional guidance, by a group of monks between 1935 and 1938 in the neo-Byzantine style. Now the Communist activists painted them over as high as they could reach. Local activist Sashko Makakhov had confidently declared, "No one will ever see these gods again!" The alabaster monument of local nobleman Alexander Lahodovsky was broken up (it has since been restored and moved to the fortress-museum of Olesko).
One evening in 1954, local Komsomol (Communist Youth League) activists destroyed the statue of the Virgin over the spring of healing water. They partly dismantled the belfry and topped the adjoining gate with a sign reading "Long live the Communist Party of the Soviet Union." By order of the party district committee, a large outdoor cross that had been erected in 1938, on the 950th anniversary of the Baptism of Rus', was broken up. Workers managed to chip off the outer shell of the cross, but could not destroy the metal armature underneath. The villagers relate that when they summoned the blacksmith Iosyf Turchyn to cut it up, he refused.
In the mid-1950s, with the threat of anti-communist insurgents abated, the local party leaders saw the recreational potential of this secluded site. With its fresh air and wooded hills, the Univ monastery became an unofficial resort for the party elite. The village was renamed Mizhhiria. After all, the name "Univ" not only recalled the old monastery, but seemed to symbolize the detested "Unia" - the 1596 union of the Orthodox Metropolitanate of Kyiv with the Roman Catholic Church.
Meanwhile, the surviving Studites sought to maintain some form of monastic life. A few managed to remain in the ex-monastery as caretakers, employees or farm workers. One returned from exile under an assumed name to fix the gutters and visit the cemetery on Monks' Hill. Another corresponded with Father Josef Peters, who had survived Dachau and lived in Germany. Many Studite monks continued to live in groups according to their monastic rule in apartments in Lviv or other towns and villages. As part of the network of the underground Greek-Catholic Church, they maintained a central administration under Archimandrite Nikanor, who lived in Lviv from 1963 to his death in 1982. His successor, Father Iurii, lived in nearby Peremyshliany and would occasionally make illegal visits to the monastery, holding secret nocturnal services in the old cells. He died in June 1990, having witnessed the resurrection of his Church.
A movement for legalization of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church had gained momentum in the 1980s, particularly with the advent of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms. The Church was effectively legalized in December 1989, when President Gorbachev visited Pope John Paul II in Rome. Immediately after, Greek-Catholic communities were permitted to register with the authorities and begin a legal existence. Hundreds of parishes that had been forcibly turned over to the Russian Orthodox Church in the late 1940s returned to Catholicism. Meanwhile, in June 1989 the villagers of Univ had already formed an "Initiative Group for the Rebirth of the Village." At a July rally they demanded the return of the monastery church. Later that year they were joined by the Memorial society, which petitioned for registration of the parish.
The communist authorities sought to sidestep the issue by offering to register the parish independently of the Greek-Catholic Church - and even tried to placate the faithful by replacing a bust of Lenin with a small cross. But a survey conducted in January 1990 revealed that 372 out of 394 villagers desired to register the parish as Greek-Catholic. The following year, the church and three monastic cells were returned to the monks, and the first liturgy was celebrated on Christmas Eve. Eventually, popular pressure forced the district council to return all the buildings and a small part of the nationalized land to the monastery.
After Ukrainian independence and the fall of the USSR at the end of 1991, the complex was renovated with assistance from German benefactors, notably the archdiocese of Mainz. As for Father Hedeon - after legalization he was able to rejoin the Greek-Catholic Church and returned to Univ in 1996.
One day Yaroslav Movchan, a restorer from a Lviv enterprise, showed several of us the ongoing restorations of the modern frescoes in the monastery church. When the Soviet Union collapsed, workers began to remove the green paint with which the Communist activists had covered the frescoes. The first image they uncovered was that of St. Theodore the Studite. Removing the paint, however, was only the first step. Now the restorers must repair the original artwork. They work carefully, designating their own additions with lighter tones.
On some afternoons I would walk out past the belfry along the chalky, dusty road through the village. The houses on both sides and the fields behind them filled a shallow valley between golden hills capped by deep green forests of oak, fir and spruce. The earth had a salt smell. From the back yards of the one-story houses drifted the din of ducks, roosters, hens and geese. Along the way I passed wood plank wagons with rubber tires, drawn by tired nags.
In the middle of the village was a crossroads, where a stone cross overgrown with flowered vines commemorated the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the serfs in 1848. In this, Austria had anticipated Russia, which abolished serfdom in 1861. In both cases, economic hardships and legal obligations had continued to burden the peasantry. Nevertheless, the abolition of feudal servitude had great significance for the people, and memorial crosses could once be found in hundreds of villages throughout Halychyna.
I walked through the far side of the village and out into the fields. The dirt track was muddy and uneven. At the edge of a field I encountered another white stone cross, marking a boundary where a hill rose up into the thick forest. Returning through the village, I passed a horse-drawn wagon laden with hay. Birds sang, insects hummed in the grass, dogs barked. The sun was setting beyond the fields of corn and hay. A solitary automobile bounced along the road, later a truck with a load of hay. Children, youths and women ambled along, talking quietly in the familiar dialect of Halychyna.
On weekdays the village and the monastery live their separate lives, but on Sundays the villagers crowd into the monastery church for the liturgy. The women stand on the left, the men on the right. A few benches along the sides accommodate those unable to stand. Unlike the weekday services, which are in Church Slavonic, the Sunday liturgy is in modern Ukrainian. As in the Orthodox liturgy, the recitation of the Creed omits the filioque.
From the perspective of Univ, city life is worlds away. One warm Friday afternoon I packed a bag and hiked up the dirt road through the forest and down across the fields to the bus-stop on the paved two-lane road. A passing motorist took me to the outskirts of Lviv. There I caught a streetcar to the city center. Dropping my bag in the living room of my relatives' apartment, I strode out again into the town center, with its lengths of crenellated walls, Renaissance and Baroque churches and palaces, and Hapsburg-period apartment houses. The city's gilded youth, decked out in the latest European fashions, paraded about the parks and boulevards, as if in some Mediterranean city.
But alongside the prosperity of the new elite, a large part of the population is slipping into poverty. There are beggars in the streets. Here and there an old woman in a kerchief sits on the pavement, hawking a handful of vegetables. The outskirts are more reminiscent of Greece or Mexico, the sidewalks cluttered with makeshift stands displaying a variety of household goods, packaged foods and popular novels. The noise and stench of diesel buses and run-down cars are suffocating. Crumbling walls are crammed with garish posters and graffiti. Along a major thoroughfare a prostitute awaits the affluent customer, while pedestrians step around a drunk lying bleeding on the ground.
On Sunday I attended morning liturgy at St. George's, the Rococo cathedral of the Greek-Catholic archbishop-metropolitan of Lviv, which overlooks the city from one of its highest hills. It was crowded with standing worshippers. The service was chanted by several priests and a well-trained choir. It resembled a concert. Compared to the concentrated, intimate worship of the monastic church at Univ, this seemed public, formal, almost impersonal.
I caught the bus for Univ in the late afternoon. At the village of Iaktoriv the bus turned off the main road, passing the pre-war National Home and the tall wooden church as it wound up into the hills. The driver let me off by a muddy path. The evening sun was warm, and my bag seemed heavy as I panted up the hill between the cow pastures. At the top, the path turned into a fragrant forest, emerging about a quarter of a mile further along into a clearing, from which a magnificent view of the monastery opened up below. The sun was setting as I tramped into the dining hall, stamping the dust and mud from my shoes, and joined my colleagues for supper. It was good to be back.
There are those, however, who walk the whole way. Every year on the monastery's feast-day - the Dormition is the Eastern equivalent of the Assumption, and by the Julian calendar falls on August 28 - scores of pilgrims spend a few days walking from Lviv to Univ. Mostly students and young people, they camp out at church halls in villages along the way. Arriving at Univ on the feast day of the Virgin, they participate in the elaborate monastic observances. And they kneel by the monastery wall to fill plastic jugs and bottles with water from the legendary spring.
In Soviet times, the way to the spring was often blocked by the police. In 1972 a particularly zealous facility director covered the spring with concrete slabs and diverted the stream into a culvert. Every year on the feast of the Dormition he would gather the local Communist Party activists, Communist Youth League members, KGB, schoolteachers, police, firemen and first-aid workers to try to stop the pilgrims. When they could not reach the spring, the faithful filled their jugs from the stream, leaving flowers behind as a token of their devotion.
Not all of today's Ukrainians, of course, are in the habit of trekking to monasteries. Close to half are not believers at all, and millions believe in God but remain unchurched. Nominal Christianity is common. One weekend after the Sunday liturgy at St. Michael's, a favorite church of Lviv's students and intelligentsia, I joined an acquaintance and his bride. As we drove in their Daewoo to the Hill of Glory, a crumbling Soviet war monument, he related how his marriage preparation had occasioned some moral introspection.
An engineer-turned-businessman, he sold his products abroad and thus had regular dealings with corrupt customs officials. The institutionalized deceit disgusted him. Yet there seemed no other way to stay in business. From the monument, which affords a splendid view of the city, we walked to a private restaurant with tasteful decor, clean tablecloths, and attentive service. Over a glass of Cahors, a whipped cream dessert and strong black coffee, my acquaintance ruefully described the atmosphere at a local university where he had been teaching. The students showed minimal interest and commonly skipped class, for they knew that survival in post-Soviet society required business acumen, not academic learning. And a good part of business acumen was knowing how to deal with demands for bribes and protection money. You didn't learn that in school.
The couple offered to drive me all the way back to Univ, and I agreed. I sensed they were eager to visit the monastery, which they had not seen in many years. They toured the grounds, stopping in the students' refectory for tea and some amiable conversation with one of the nuns in my class. As they told me later, they could not grasp how an attractive young woman could give up the "good life" to live out her days in a nunnery. They took some photographs, said good-bye and drove back to the city - but not before filling a few jugs from the spring in the monastery wall.
On our last evening at Univ, a group of students and teachers climbed up a nearby hill to an old quarry. It was pitch black and quite chilly. Some of the students prepared a bonfire. The young men gathered tree branches, sharpened them, and strung them with potatoes, onions and tomatoes. We roasted the vegetables in the fire, and ate them with squash and chunks of white country bread. As the fire died down we could barely recognize each other. It grew colder. In the silent hilly landscape, the moon seemed soft, close, as in a dream. High up in the sky we saw the blinking signal lights of an airliner. We sat down on some logs, and took turns recounting our impressions of the past month. Then the women began to sing - now a melancholy love song, now a jarring, earthy Hutsul chant. At last we rose and closed the evening with a Marian hymn.
The next morning we said good-bye to the hegumen and monks, and boarded the bus for Lviv. Brother Andrii climbed up into the belfry. As we rumbled out toward the village road, the bells tolled in farewell.
What draws us - students, teachers, pilgrims, newlyweds or casual visitors - to Univ? Is it the contact with the alien, mysterious world of prayer and contemplation? Is it the history of fortitude and martyrdom? Do we seek wisdom, advice, enlightenment - or just a drink of water from the healing spring?
The best vacations exceed our stereotypical images and banal expectations, offering something unanticipated, new. Univ was like that. I had come for the professional teaching experience. But later, when circumstances rendered it practically useless, it was Father Illya's hard lesson about acceptance that proved more valuable. Perhaps that is the allure of Univ: whatever you might seek there, you may come away with something altogether different, unexpected, even undesired; yet it is precisely what you need.
According to the founding legend of the Univ monastery, the nobleman Lahodovsky had originally wanted to build his church on Monks' Hill. This was logical enough with regard to defensibility. Yet each time he ascended the hill, the Virgin vanished. And each time he descended to the spring, she reappeared. He then understood that, contrary to his own reason and intent, he was to build on the site of the spring. When, centuries later, the most determined enemies of the faith came to seize the monastery, a hilltop location would hardly have stopped them. But they, in turn, could not stop up the spring, or the streams of faithful seeking to slake their thirst.
CONCLUSION
On visiting monastic communities
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, August 29, 2004, No. 35, Vol. LXXII
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