An Ascetic's Holiday: A month at the Holy Dormition Monastery in Univ
by Andrew Sorokowski
PART I
Every summer, while travel agents entice young Europeans with sun, sand and sex, a dozen or so 20- and 30-somethings spend their four-week holiday at the Holy Dormition Monastery in Univ. Lost among the hills and forests of western Ukraine, Univ lies east of Lviv in the old province of Galicia. There the vacationers attend lectures, read, study, take walks and join the monks in prayer. Among them you may find a graduate student in history, a television producer, a ticket-seller, a law student, a nun, a teacher, an editor. They live in a partly renovated Soviet-era dormitory adjoining the monastery with occasional hot water, frequent blackouts, and sagging mattresses on hard metal beds.
What moves them to spend their precious vacations in this way?
To be sure, monastic holidays have become trendy. Europeans and Americans flock to Buddhist monasteries and retreat houses in Japan, the Himalayas and even western Massachusetts. The very summer I went to Univ, the tabloids were reporting that Prince Charles was heading for a monastery in Greece, prudently taking along a comfortable bed.
The impulse to visit sacred places in search of wisdom is at least as old as the Delphic oracle. In the Christian East, of course, lay visits to monasteries are nothing new. Monasticism played a major role in the formation of Byzantine spirituality in the Kyivan tradition. While the severe life of a monk may seem alien to the laity, there is much in it that can serve as an example. Even married life, it is said, can sometimes benefit from the monastic virtues of voluntary poverty, obedience and even chastity.
According to the Belgian scholar Archimandrite Boniface Luykx, the basic principle of Eastern monastic spirituality is deification, which involves a "constant urge for holiness" and a "joyful detachment." In his view, Eastern monasticism presents "a paradigm of true Christianity in the midst of a worldwide crisis of values," offering the genuine values "that modern man needs in order to recover from his nihilism," and which are "the backbone for building up a new world." These values, he stresses, are not mere wishes, for in the Eastern monasteries they have been lived out, "not just perfunctorily, but charismatically, with joyful and creative commitment" (Eastern Monasticism and the Future of the Church, 1993, pp. 176-180), or, as Father Zosima puts it in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, "a monk is not a different kind of man, but merely such as all men on earth ought to be."
I came to Univ to teach a course in history at the summer school organized by the Lviv Theological Academy and the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies in Ottawa. The prospect of escaping my daily routine and embarking on an adventure in this far-off land had tantalized me for months. Yet, already on the flight from Boston to Frankfurt, something began to change. I felt my everyday pretensions and preoccupations, my petty attachments and ambitions, beginning to peel away like scales. From a distance, the world I was leaving behind appeared more and more trivial. Frankfurt Airport was a disappointment - acres of cold marble, vast and sterile halls: affluence without soul or substance. Groggy from the overnight flight, I bought an Italian espresso from an Arab attendant at an American-style snack bar, then boarded the plane for Lviv.
I arrived in the midst of a luminous July afternoon. I was served supper in my relatives' airy apartment in a dingy but stolid turn-of-the-century Viennese-style building on St. George's Hill. Then I lay down on a couch in the living/dining room which was to be my bedroom, with its 14-foot ceilings and high curtained windows facing a courtyard, and descended into a deep, long sleep.
The next day was cool and bright. I packed my bags and stumbled down the cobblestone streets to the tree-lined central mall, flanked by broad boulevards and presided over by the neo-classical Opera House, past the medieval market square and town hall to St. Michael's Church, where the chartered bus to Univ was waiting. Since my last visit, the city's varied facades - from Renaissance to Viennese Sezession and Art Deco - had been cleaned and repainted. New cafe-bars and minuscule restaurants peered invitingly from underneath the massive old structures. There was almost nothing Soviet left; it looked and felt like a part of Europe again.
Repeatedly stalling between neutral and first gear, the bus clattered through the town, which grew shabbier as we left the center. We passed eastward through the hilly suburb of Vynnyky, with its cheerfully dilapidated houses and disorderly gardens. The bus lurched along the two-lane highway that connects Lviv with Kyiv, some 300 miles to the east. We traversed a series of villages, their yards alive with geese, ducks, goats and the occasional horse. From time to time a golden church dome gleamed in the distance.
Near me sat a couple of nuns. They were singing the Jesus prayer, plaintively, over and over again: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us sinners." Frankly, I found it a bit annoying. The others chatted quietly.
We hurtled through flat green fields bordered by dark forests and rising hills. A filly grazed in a pasture. We passed tractors; horse-drawn wagons made of planks, with rubber tires; and women in kerchiefs ambling along or gathered at brightly painted concrete bus stations. Here and there were tracts of gleaming new private housing, some of it built by weekend amateurs, much of it financed by relatives in America.
We turned off the highway and rattled through the village of Univ. At the crossroads in the center of the village, the bus turned up a dirt road running parallel to a stream. At the edge of the village, where the dark green forest rose up with the hills, there suddenly appeared an enormous white fortified Baroque structure, like some alien visitor from another age. It was surrounded by thick walls and a shallow moat spanned by a short bridge leading to a wooden portal. Through the open gate one could glimpse a courtyard, in the center of which stood a church.
We picked out our luggage from the storage compartment of the bus and carried it to our rooms in a Soviet-built annex behind the monastery. On one side of the tiny foyer leading to my room and that of my neighbor, a Canadian archaeologist, was a shared bathroom with a toilet and sink, and on the other a shower room. My room lacked a lightbulb, which, however, was promptly supplied. Curtainless windows looked out onto a small muddy field at the edge of the forest. There was a desk and chair, a bed, and an armoire for my clothes.
As soon as we were settled, a group of us walked out through the muddy courtyard, still under reconstruction, and out the gate. We passed the spare wooden bell tower, an altana, and the spring that trickled from an opening in a rock by the monastery wall into a stream flowing across the grassy field towards the village.
This spring is the monastery's source and origin. Like other monasteries and pilgrimage shrines, Univ has a founding legend centered on a spring of healing waters. (A version of this legend was published at Zhovkva in 1904 by Ivan Butsmaniuk, and quoted by Ihor Mytsko in his history of the Univ monastery, "Sviatouspens'ka Lavra v Unevi [kinets' XIII st.-kinets' XX st.]," Lviv, 1998; most of the historical data in this article are based on Mytsko's study.) According to this account, in medieval times a vassal of Prince Fedir Liubartovych by the name of Lahodovsky, the lord of the village of Lahodiv and surrounding lands, was suffering from a disease causing gradual paralysis of his legs. Directed by a dream of the Mother of God, he headed east in search of a miraculous spring that, she told him, would cure his illness. Lahodovsky found the spring and was indeed healed.
In gratitude he built a chapel and a monastery on the site. He invited the monks of St. Basil the Great to build up what came to be known as the Monastery of the Holy Dormition, in honor of the death and assumption (in Byzantine tradition, the dormition or "falling asleep") of the Mother of God.
The walls that rise up behind the spring are a reminder of the precarious times in which the monastery developed. After being burned by the Tatars in 1549, it was rebuilt as a stone fortress, complete with battlements and an outer wall linking four towers. Around this time, the women's monastery of the Transfiguration was built on Monk's Hill. During the great Kozak-peasant uprising of 1648, which shook the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to its foundations, the insurgents' Tatar allies carried off numerous villagers. Others sought protection within the monastery walls. But the Kozaks managed to enter the church under the pretext of attending the liturgy. They then proceeded to despoil the monastery and its inhabitants. After the abbot and monks paid them a ransom, however, they departed without perpetrating the expected massacre.
We crossed the wooden bridge, passed through the monastery gate into the courtyard, and entered the church. Its dim interior was illuminated by narrow Gothic windows beneath a vaulted ceiling. The walls are decorated with neo-Byzantine frescoes. Square stone plates constitute the floor. Halfway down the single nave, we could discern on the left wall the icon of the Mother of God. On the opposite side of the nave stands a stone monument to Metropolitan Mykhailo Levytskyi, who died at Univ in January of 1858 and is buried in the church. A new iconostasis (icon-screen), carved in wood by masters from Lviv in the 1990s, separates the nave from the sanctuary. The altar, as is customary, faces east.
Metropolitan Levyts'kyi in fact spent most of his tenure at Univ rather than Lviv, saving the monastery from ruin. Halychyna (Galicia) had come under Austrian rule with the first partition of Poland in 1772. The Hapsburgs generally tolerated the Uniate Church, which they dubbed Greek-Catholic to indicate its Greek-Byzantine rite and its equality with the Roman rite. Nevertheless, the secularizing reforms of Emperor Joseph II took their toll. Thus, the Holy Dormition Monastery succumbed to the monastery closings of 1787. Three years later it was formally liquidated and its buildings put to secular use. But by collecting books from the entire province at the monastery, making it a center of historical and liturgical study, Metropolitan Levytskyi preserved it into modern times.
I returned to the church that evening at about 6:30. The monks were praying the Ninth Hour - the "hours" being counted, in the ancient fashion, from dawn to dusk - followed by vespers. Like most of the services, vespers was sung in Church Slavonic. Clustered about lecterns laden with thick hymnals, the monks chanted in two groups, alternating verse by verse, with a brisk, manly energy - so different from the ethereal, plaintive supplications of Gregorian chant - leaving us barely enough time to catch the beauty of the passages. Byzantine-rite vespers include Psalms 104; the supplicatory 141, 142 and 130 ("De Profundis"); and the brief, laudatory Psalm 117. Later I would find it particularly apt to hear the 104th psalm, with its natural imagery and praise of Creation, after an afternoon of hiking in the surrounding hills. As vespers drew to a close we would join in singing our favorite part, the ancient prayer Tykhyi Svit.
At 8 p.m. the administrators, teachers and students met for supper in the dining room. We ate rough tasty bread and kasha (buckwheat groats) with black blood sausage, followed by cheesecake and tea. After supper, several of us went outside to watch the sun setting behind the forested hills and to talk in the deepening dusk. The darkening sky began to cloud over, and suddenly it became cold. At 9:15 p.m. I was back in my unheated room and sank, exhausted, into bed.
I was not privy to living conditions in the monastery, but in the annex they were spartan. During the first week hot water was sporadic, and from time to time there was no water at all. The bathroom had no mirror. Consequently, I had to learn to shave blind, and developed the habit of inspecting the results at a huge antique mirror in the hallway on my way to the morning service. There were a few planned regional power blackouts in the evenings; on such occasions, candles were distributed. Thus, some of our informal talks or prayer meetings were conducted by candlelight, which heightened the mystical atmosphere. One evening there might be hot water but no electricity, making it too dark to take a shower; another evening there might be electricity but no hot water. To make things worse, the summer was unusually cool. I wore my one blue V-neck sweater nearly every day.
Every morning at 5:30 someone came down the halls with a wooden rattle to wake us for the utrennia (Greek orthros), or morning service, akin to matins. I would pass through the courtyard, under the arch, and over to the wooden bridge leading to the monastery gate. Cows were already grazing on the grounds. Inside the church it was dark. I could see candles burning before the icon of the Mother of God of Univ, before the four icons of the iconostasis, on the tetrapod (a small square table between the altar and the nave) and, dimly visible through the royal doors of the iconostasis, upon the altar. The morning service includes several psalms, beginning appropriately enough with the cleansing motif of the 51st and continuing with the Psalms of Praise (148-150). During the service one could see the sky brightening through the church windows. At half-past seven the monks began a glorious liturgy.
Back in my room, I might read or prepare my next lecture. At nine we would gather for breakfast. The plentiful food and comradely atmosphere raised my spirits. In silence we drank tea and ate kasha in milk, dry white cheese, and fresh bread and butter, while one of the students read from Scripture.
I taught a 90-minute class, at 10-11:30 a.m. At the beginning of each class, the students rose to sing (not merely recite) the prayer "Heavenly King." During the break, they would make me a much-needed cup of strong black coffee. Teaching was particularly rewarding because the students seemed thirsty for new methods and approaches to studying and thinking about history. They were accustomed to formalistic Soviet-style teaching, with the professor delivering polished lectures and the students dutifully taking notes, memorizing facts and rarely asking questions, much less challenging the lecturer.
They were bemused when I invited them to analyze historical documents on their own. They rightly questioned their own competence to reach absolute, definitive conclusions, but seemed to understand the value of learning historical method through critical source analysis. And they quickly caught on to my informal American teaching style. Most of them quickly overcame their reluctance to suggest alternative views or interpretations. In fact, the most inquisitive and outspoken student was one of the young nuns whom I had heard chanting on the bus from Lviv.
My teaching was limited by the available technology. We had no textbooks. Instead, the modest array of volumes transported from the Lviv Theological Academy and arranged on tables in the "library" had to be shared. Making photocopies was slow and laborious. But when it came time to type up the final examination I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the monastery did have a computer. Contact with the outside world was another matter, as there did not seem to be any telephone lines. As in much of the Second World, however, the lack of infrastructure had prompted the monks to skip that stage of modernization and pass directly to the wireless age. The monastic mobile phone was convenient and could be used practically anywhere. Consequently, my first experience with mobile telephony was taking a call while standing on a drawbridge over a moat.
After classes, a number of the students would walk over to the monastery church to join the monks for the Sixth Hour, followed by lunch back in the dining hall at 2 p.m. Meals were prepared from products of the monastery farm and cooked by volunteers from the village: lots of porridge, corn pudding (kulesha), kasha, vegetable soups, potatoes, cucumbers, sausage, fresh country bread, white farmer's cheese, honey from the monastic apiary, tea, and small apples. Lunch was usually eaten in silence, with the students taking turns reading from the Lives of the Saints.
The rest of the afternoon was free for rest, walks, conversation or study. The Ninth Hour, followed by vespers, began at about 6:30 p.m. Supper was late, but now we were free to converse. Afterwards, one of the monks might give an informal talk or lead us in prayer.
On some days after lunch I would take walks with the students or sit under the altana and talk. We compared life in Ukraine and the West, and discussed such topics as genres and approaches in historical writing, market reform, Kravchuk and Kuchma, the American legal system, and even that wayward rusyn, Andy Warhol. These were serious, motivated students, the kind one sometimes encounters in adult-education classes. They were not blinded by the appeal of the West, or distracted by the lure of consumer goods - though at least one was considering working abroad for sheer economic survival.
One of my students was a ticket-seller at the railroad station. Of Eastern Ukrainian and Orthodox background, but without any particular religious upbringing, she had taken an interest in the Greek-Catholic faith. In Lviv she had found a parish where the preaching addressed her needs and where there was a group of like-minded young adults who attended every Sunday and frequently met for discussions.
Another student told me the story of her grandfather, a Greek-Catholic priest. In the 19th and early 20th century, it was the clerical families that gave birth to the Ukrainian intelligentsia of Halychyna. Newly graduated seminarians would typically marry the daughters of priests. At least one son would become a priest, and their daughters, wives of priests. Other children might become teachers, scholars, lawyers, physicians or engineers.
My student's grandfather, Father Volodymyr Senkivskyi, was born in Ternopil when Halychyna was still under Austrian rule. Upon completing his seminary studies he married, and was ordained by Bishop Ivan Buchko. After the Red Army occupied Halychyna in 1944-1945, he was arrested and sentenced to a term in the labor camps, which he served in Kemerovo, western Siberia. After Stalin's death in 1953, many priests were allowed to return home. Father Volodymyr came back in 1956, but of course could not openly minister to the faithful.
After classes on the first day, my colleague the archaeologist led several of us along a muddy, rutted road up Monk's Hill to an archaeological dig that may provide the evidence to confirm or refute the monastery's foundation myth. So far, the evidence suggests that the area was settled by the ninth or 10th century. But when was the monastery founded? The medieval Rus' state was Christianized at Kyiv around 988. The monastic rule of St. Theodore the Studite (died 826), developed in Constantinople, was adopted in Rus' in the 11th century. Monasteries, which served as libraries and cultural centers as well as communities of prayer and communal life, spread throughout Kyivan Rus', including the Galician-Volynian principality in what is today western Ukraine.
The princes of Halych-Volyn, or one of their vassals, could well have founded Univ. The location was advantageous, lying near the east-west overland trade route linking the medieval towns of Halych and Lviv (the latter founded in the mid-1200s) with Kyiv to the east and Krakow to the west. Kyiv lay on the river route between Scandinavia and Constantinople, as well as the land route to the Orient, while Krakow lay on the Vistula, which flows north to the Baltic. Not far from Lviv are the headwaters of the Dnister, which flows south to the Black Sea, also providing access to Constantinople - long the grandest city of Christendom.
The Mongols invaded Kyivan Rus' in the 1240s. The grand prince of Halych became a vassal of the khan, though in 1253 Prince Danylo received a royal crown from the pope. Could the monastery have been founded by refugees from Mongol rule? There is documentary evidence that it already existed by the end of the 13th century; it is specifically mentioned in a Polish royal charter of 1395.
We clambered up Monk's Hill over thick tree-roots and slippery mud. In the midst of the forest we came upon Prof. Berest, who was in charge of the expedition excavating the early settlements. He showed us some gravestones, one with skeletal remains. Nearby were traces of a church or monastery dating to perhaps the 13th century. Further on we saw a few stone "Kozak crosses" from the 16th or 17th century. There was also an engraved slab of stone covering a grave. In a separate area of the dense forest were the brick remains of monks' cells, and their cemetery.
Not far away was a hideout dug into the ground by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the 1940s, where a battle with Soviet security forces had been fought around 1950. Further on, where the trees yielded to a clearing, one could see the traces of an earthen wall and a sort of moat, built possibly in the ninth or 10th century.
Whatever the archaeological evidence may reveal about the monastery's origins, the historical picture becomes clearer from the 17th century. Like other Orthodox monasteries, it was headed by an archimandrite, whose second in command was the hegumen (abbot). This arrangement has remained to the present day, despite the fact that in 1700 the Holy Dormition Monastery was officially joined with the Roman Church along with the entire eparchy (diocese) of Lviv, and thus became "Uniate." For some time the monks retained their Eastern customs, including abstinence from meat and the wearing of long hair and beards. They also sought to retain the relative autonomy traditionally enjoyed by Eastern-rite monasteries.
In the 18th century the monks of Univ joined the Eastern-rite Catholic Order of St. Basil the Great. While the monastery had printed some church books in the 1600s, it now became an important publishing center. In the 1760s and 1770s, a school of philosophy and theology served to educate the monks. Then came Enlightened Despotism and secularization under the Austrian Hapsburgs.
It was only in the tenure of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky (1901-1944), a Polish count of Ruthenian ancestry, that monastic life was revived at Univ. By this time, the Greek-Catholic Church had taken the lead in the Ruthenian national revival, which in the early years of the 20th century adopted a Ukrainian national orientation. Evidently as part of this ethnic and religious renaissance, groups of young peasants in the western Ukrainian countryside sought to restore the ancient Eastern monastic way of life. The metropolitan welcomed these efforts, though he saw that the dominant and somewhat elitist Basilian order, to which he belonged, would not suit these young idealists.
Metropolitan Sheptytsky's demands were simple yet stern. It is related that when he provided several of the aspiring monks a parish house at Sknyliv near Lviv, he told them to "live as you wish; if you survive a year without any help, this will be a sign that you are able to found a new monastic community." In 1906 the Sknyliv community was chartered, with a version of the rule of St. Theodore the Studite developed by the metropolitan himself. The Studite rule was ascetic and severe. Yet soon the Sknyliv monastery attracted not only local Ukrainians, but also a Pole, a Croatian, a Frenchman, a Dutchman and some Karaims. They were joined by Josef Peters, who came from Germany by foot, and Leonid Fyodorov, who was to become the founder of the Russian Catholic Church.
PART I
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, August 22, 2004, No. 34, Vol. LXXII
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