Crna Reka Monastery
The monastery Crna Reka ( Serbian Manastir Crna Reka / Манастир Црна Река , German transcription roughly like Monastery on the Black River ) is a rock monastery of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the Sandžak region or in the Raška administrative district near the border with the autonomous province of Kosovo .
location
The facility is located in the canyon of the Crna Reka River , on the slopes of the Mokra Gora . The closest municipalities are Novi Pazar , Kosovska Mitrovica and Rožaje . The monastery is surrounded by deep ravines and heavily wooded forests. It was built at a point where the Crna Reka river gets lost in underground passages above the monastery, only to flow out of the ground a few hundred meters later. Thanks to its hidden and inaccessible location, the monastery was spared raids and the chaos of war over the centuries, so that it still presents itself in its original appearance today. Little was known about the monastery even among the Serbian public. The monastery serves as a place of pilgrimage for the locals in the area, of both Christian and Islamic faith. Administratively belongs today the monastery with its about 28 monks to the eparchy of Raszien-Prizren .
history
The first known monastic settlements date from the 13th century, Peter Koriški, who was beatified by the Orthodox Church , led a hermit here . Later, Joanikije Devički, who was also canonized, moved with his monks to Crna Reka, before moving on to what is now Kosovo and founding the Devič Monastery . It is no longer known who the founders of today's monastery complex were - in any case, the construction is dated to the 13th or 14th century.
During the Ottoman rule , the monastery often served as a hiding place for relics important to the church . In the 18th century there is a clerk's room which dealt with copying liturgical books. A monastery school is also said to have existed, but there is no reliable evidence for its existence.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the first boarding school in the whole of northern Kosovo was founded in the monastery complex , which was later closed and whose rooms are now used by the monastery. Today there is a church rehabilitation center for drug addicts in the monastery complex.
Web links
Coordinates: 42 ° 56 ′ 49.9 ″ N , 20 ° 28 ′ 5.1 ″ E