RUSSIAN WORLD The Lavra of Discord

Since March 29, according to the provisions of the Kiev Ministry of Culture, eviction operations have been underway for the Kiev Lavra of the Caves, the founding monastery of all the spirituality of Kievan Rus and its heir, the Church Orthodox. Some monks have already left the buildings, especially those that were occupied by shops, with all kinds of machinery and tools, but the leaders of the community insist on staying.

All the leaders of Russian Orthodoxy and other spheres have mobilized in favor of the Lavra, beginning with Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, and also many hierarchs of other Orthodox Churches around the world. In the Ukraine there is a large concentration of metropolitans, archbishops, archimandrites and higumens, both from the Muscovite jurisdiction and from the autocephalous and Greek-Catholic jurisdictions, all determined to assert their right to represent the faithful who crowd at the gates of the monastery, of the main church and the different chapels.

Metropolitan Onufryj (Berezovskij) of kyiv is the head of the Church UPZ, still formally linked to the Moscow Patriarchate, and in recent days called a local synod to ask the government not to proceed with the eviction. President Zelensky did not want to receive it, and sent it to the Minister of Culture Tkachenko, who, although he assured that “violence will not be used,” confirmed the eviction order. Another metropolitan of the UPZKliment (Večerja) from Nežinsk, president of the synodal department for information and culture, insists that “there is no legal document that obliges the monks to leave the Lavra”, questioning the ministry about the legality of the termination of the usufruct contract: “The date of March 29, 2023 is not there, so neither today, nor tomorrow nor the day after tomorrow we are obliged to leave.”

The most active and impetuous of the metropolitans of the UPZ it is undoubtedly Pavel (Lebed), superior (namestnik) of the Lavra since 1994, a staunch supporter of Patriarch Kirill, who has never stopped traveling to Moscow for instructions and represents the most intransigent wing of pro-Russian Ukrainian monasticism. His position is not only due to the obligation imposed by his position, but also reflects his personality, very determined and politically and socially committed. In Ukraine he is known as “Paša-Mercedes” for his passion for luxury cars, and this reputation as a “metropolitan oligarch” has also been shared with Kirill since the 1990s, when both tried to support church activities with a strong entrepreneurial spirit. . For this reason, many businesses were opened in the different buildings of the Lavra, some related to the needs of worship (printing, production of candles and liturgical garments, icons and art objects), as is often the case in great sanctuaries around the world, but also others intended solely for economic activities, such as furniture factories, technical businesses, grocery stores, mechanical workshops, among others.

Metropolitan Pavel declared that the community will not move “until all the procedures and legal appeals are concluded”, about which there is no precise information. He also stressed that the usufruct is linked to “an indefinite-term contract”, specifying that “there is certainly no need to terminate it in time of war.” Faced with the compromise proposal according to which only Onufryj, Pavel and the seminar of the UPZ they would have to leave, to which the first seems to be willing, the second responded in a martyrological tone that “you don’t come down from the cross, they come down from the cross.” He added that “if we leave kyiv, we will also be kicked out of Počaev [donde se encuentra otro gran monasterio]and then they will start messing with the female monasteries as well”.

He namestnik recalled that “all the presidents of Ukraine were elected thanks to the prayers of the priests and faithful of the Church UPZ“, underlining the political strength of Russian Orthodox monasticism. At the same time, he declared that “he will no longer speak to journalists, who begin to make scandals precisely during the Great Lenten Fast”, using the verb for “scandal” buzzit, an expression not exactly refined, which is used for street brawlers. “Look what’s happening up front, an egg costs 17 grivnas, they steal billions everywhere, and you mess with the Church, as if the monks were guilty of everything,” he replied. “I was scared when they invited me on television: they sit there with their tattoos and their earrings, where do they come from? From the forest? And they try to explain to me how to live? But you can only throw anathemas at them… “, the metropolitan shouted angrily, who assured that he “has had a car for many years, not like all of you.”

On the opposite side, the kyiv Metropolitan of the Autocephalous Church PZU, Epifanyj (Dumenko), has already requested the drafting of a new usufruct contract to replace that of the UPZ, not only for the Lavra, but for all the other monasteries scattered throughout the country, which remain state property. Meanwhile, instead of Pavel appointed a new namestnik of the Lavra, the archimandrite Avraamij (Lotyš), a monk who a few months ago passed from the jurisdiction of the UPZ to the one of the PZU. For this reason, his former confreres call him “brother Judas”, and he was immediately excommunicated by the mild-mannered Onufryj. Avraamikh immediately invited all the monks to stay in his cells, logically also passing under Epifanyj’s homophorion (metropolitan’s stole).

As if that were not enough, even the senior archbishop of the Greek Catholic Church (UGKZ), Svjatoslav Ševčuk, whom all his faithful call “Patriarch of Kiev”, expressed the wish to be able to celebrate at least some liturgies in the churches of the Lavra, considering himself, not without reason, heir to the great fathers of ancient Christianity. Rus’. In fact, in the Lavra the Theological Academy of Metropolitan Petro Mogila was born in the 17th century, which united the traditions of the East and the West through the Jesuit scholasticism, the cradle of modern Ukraine.

Monasteries are usually oases of peace, silence and meditation, but this was never the case of the Lavra of the Caves, forge of many souls of Russian Christianity. It developed in the middle of the 11th century, thanks to the enlightened leadership of the son of the first prince Vladimir, Jaroslav “the Wise”, who wanted to give Kiev Christianity a spiritual and cultural, social and political greatness at the same time. He entrusted one of the first monks, Nestor the Analyst, with the task of writing the “Chronicle of Present Times”, the text celebrating the conversion of Rus to Byzantine Christianity. And another monk, Ilarion, was elected the first Russian metropolitan, without waiting for a Greek prelate to be sent from Constantinople, anticipating the autonomy of the Russians from the Byzantines. Ilarion left the famous “Speech on Law and Grace” – a praise for Vladimir and the kyiv principality. In it he praised the “new people” born from the baptism of 988, thanks to the prince, a “new Constantine”, prophet of the new Christian Rome, which Moscow later took as its own definition, that of the “Third Rome”.

The first monk to settle on the hill above the Dnipro River was the elderly Antonij. He had spent some years on Mount Athos, the great “monastic republic” that began to form parallel to the kingdom of Kiev, and which served as a model for the set of individual cells and small and large community spaces for the Lavra of the Caves itself. Antonij dug the first cave to isolate himself from the world and was immediately followed by many other ascetics, until one of them, Feodosij, was entrusted with the task of bringing together a community under one rule, as had been the case with the first monks of the fourth century. , Antony and Pachomius of Egypt. Russian monasticism thus intended to “return to the origins” of the entire history of the hermits and cenobites, and in general of Christian history, which began anew in Kiev (and later in Moscow). Feodosij imposed the rule of the Greek monastery of Studion, a “classical” variant of the great rules of monasticism of the East and West, the Basilian and the Benedictine.

As the Life of Feodosij relates, “he chose an unoccupied place, situated not far from the caves, and began to work to make that place habitable: he fenced it off, built many cells, and then moved, together with his brothers, from the caves into the year 6570 [1062]”. The first namestnik “He was in the habit of making the rounds of the monks’ cells every night, to find out how each one of them lived.” In addition to the rule, in effect, the monks used the style of idiorhythm, the “diversity of vows” in which each one chose the one that best suited him: some in total silence, others painting icons, some even walled themselves off in their cells (zatvornyj), and even then it was not easy to find your way around.

He Paterikon of the Caves, a collection of stories and sayings of Kiev monks from the end of the 12th century, speaks, among others, of the monk Marko, in charge of preparing the tombs of the deceased monks by digging them beyond the caves. One day the brothers brought a monk who had died suddenly after an illness, and there was no room in the dug niches. Then Marko said to the deceased: “Brother, wait a bit, I can’t give you last rites yet.” The deceased got up, sat down and, when the time came, anointed himself and settled in the new grave.

kyiv monks are used to waiting until the time comes to take the place prepared by the Lord. A thousand years later, nothing has changed.

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