Optina monastery

The monastery with the Schisdra river in the 19th century

The Optina Monastery Russian (Введенский ставропигиальный мужской монастырь Оптина Пустынь ) is a Russian Orthodox monastery near the city of Koselsk in Kaluga Oblast . The monastery has produced a number of well-known Starzen and thus played an important role in Russian cultural history. In 1939/40 it was used as a camp for prisoner-of-war Polish officers, most of whom were murdered in the Katyn massacre .

Location and building

The main church

The monastery is located about three kilometers northeast of Koselsk on the eastern bank of the Shizdra . The monastery complex is located within an almost square area that is surrounded by a wall.

There are currently eight churches on the site of the monastery and the associated hermitage. The main church is the Vvedensky Cathedral. It was built from 1750 to 1771 and has several onion-crowned towers. Other churches are, for example, the Church in honor of the Icon of Our Lady of Kazan , the Church in honor of the Icon of Our Lady of Vladimir and the Church in honor of Saint Hilarion of Gaza . It wasn't until 2007 that the church was built in honor of the Lord's Transfiguration .

About 200 meters east of the main complex is the hermitage (Skyte) in the forest . In the middle of the hermitage is the church dedicated to John the Baptist . The hermitage was also used by the writer Fyodor Michailowitsch Dostojewski as a template for his novel The Brothers Karamazov .

The bell tower

history

The history of the monastery goes back at least to the 16th century, but until the end of the 18th century the monastery suffered from signs of deterioration, also due to the anti-monastery policies of Empress Catherine II . Metropolitan Plato of Moscow and his successor Paisius endeavored to renew and revitalize the monastery. Already in the early 19th century the monastery held a leading position in the Russian Orthodox Church, on the one hand due to the publication of spiritual texts, on the other hand due to the spiritual fathers. The influence of the monastery led, among other things, to a further spread of the Jesus prayer among the people, which was reflected in the sincere stories of a Russian pilgrim .

After the Bolsheviks came to power in the “ October Revolution ” in 1917, the monastery was officially dissolved in January 1918, but it was able to continue to operate as an agricultural cooperative for some time. Some of the monks disappeared without a trace, others died a violent death. In 1923 the last monks had to leave the monastery and the building was taken over by a collective farm . A sawmill was temporarily set up in the main church and a sanatorium in other buildings .

From September 1939 to July 1941, the NKVD, a military organized secret police, ran the Koselsk special camp for Polish officers and ensigns who had been captured in the attack by the Red Army on eastern Poland in the building complex . In April and May 1940 around 4,400 of the Koselk prisoners were brought to the Katyn forest, some 300 kilometers away , and shot there.

After the war another kolkhoz got part of the building. There was also a technical college. During perestroika , the building complex was returned to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1987, and the first church was consecrated again in 1988.