Orthodox Monasteries to Visit: A Guide

1. Which Churches This Guide Covers

This guide covers Eastern Orthodox monasteries, meaning houses belonging to the family of autocephalous churches in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople: the Churches of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, Georgia, Russia and the rest of that communion. Every site described below belongs to one of those churches, and the jurisdiction is named each time, because a monastery is always somebody's monastery and its bishop matters to how it lives.

One family of ancient churches is deliberately left out. The Armenian Apostolic Church, whose mother see is Etchmiadzin and whose famous houses include Khor Virap under Mount Ararat and the rock-cut monastery of Geghard, belongs to the Oriental Orthodox communion, as do the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Eritrean Orthodox Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Malankara churches of India. Those churches did not receive the Council of Chalcedon in 451, they are not in communion with Constantinople, and their monks are not the same communion as the monks of Athos or Valaam. Confusing the two families flattens a real division that both sides take seriously, so it is worth keeping straight from the start. Our page on the Oriental Orthodox churches and how they differ from Eastern Orthodoxy gives the history, and the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church each have their own page here.

Why the distinction matters at the door

The distinction is practical when you travel. An Armenian monastery keeps the Armenian rite in classical Armenian, uses unleavened bread, follows its own calendar of feasts, and answers to the Catholicos of All Armenians. A Greek or Russian house keeps the Byzantine rite, uses leavened bread, and answers to its own patriarch or synod. The two look superficially alike to an outsider, and they are separate churches with separate hierarchies. Speaking of them as one body is the kind of error that makes a host wince politely and say nothing.

Eastern Catholic houses are a third category

Some Byzantine-rite monasteries and shrines are Catholic. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the Melkites, the Romanian Greek Catholics and other Eastern Catholic churches keep the same rite, the same iconography and much of the same monastic literature while remaining in communion with Rome. Zarvanytsia in western Ukraine is the clearest example on this page. Our guide to the Eastern Catholic churches in communion with Rome explains how that works, and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has its own page.

Jurisdictions named on this page follow each church's own published self-description and the standard reference literature on Eastern Christianity. Where a jurisdiction is currently disputed, the dispute is stated as a dispute and no side is endorsed.

2. What an Orthodox Monastery Is

An Orthodox monastery is a community of monks or nuns living under an abbot or abbess according to a typikon, the written rule that governs its services, meals, fasts and work. The day is built around the cycle of offices, vespers, compline, the midnight office, matins and the hours, with the Divine Liturgy at its centre on the days appointed. Everything a visitor sees, the frescoes, the relics, the shops, the guest quarters, sits around that timetable and exists because of it.

Lavra, coenobium, skete and hermitage

Orthodox monasticism uses several forms and the words appear on signs and maps. A coenobitic monastery holds everything in common, with shared meals, shared work and a common rule under the abbot. An idiorrhythmic house lets monks keep their own rhythm of food, work and prayer within a looser common life, and several Athonite houses lived that way before returning to the common form in the twentieth century. A skete is a small dependent settlement of a few monks attached to a larger monastery. A hermitage or kellion holds one or two. A lavra was originally a colony of hermits gathered around a church and a leader, and the word is now an honorific title for certain great monasteries, which is why Kyiv Pechersk and Sergiev Posad carry it.

The Jesus Prayer and hesychasm

The prayer most associated with Eastern monasticism is the Jesus Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. It is repeated slowly, often counted on a woollen knotted rope, until it settles under the breath and the day. The tradition of interior stillness built around it is called hesychasm, from the Greek word for quiet, and it was defended in the fourteenth century by Saint Gregory Palamas, whose relics rest in Thessaloniki. Saint Paul's instruction to pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17) is the text these communities take most literally.

Icons, relics and the church building

The main church of a monastery is the katholikon. A screen of icons, the iconostasis, stands between the nave and the sanctuary, and the faithful venerate the icons on it with a bow and a kiss. Relics of saints are kept in reliquaries that are brought out for veneration on feasts and often left accessible daily. Catholics hold the same doctrine of images defined at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, the seventh ecumenical council, which both churches receive, so a Catholic can venerate an icon in an Orthodox church without any difficulty of conscience at all. The Eastern Orthodox Church page sets out the wider beliefs, and our page on the saints and how the Church honours them covers veneration itself.

Monastic titles you will hear

The abbot of a Greek house is the igoumenos, in Slavic languages the igumen, and an abbess is the igoumeni. A priest-monk is a hieromonk, a deacon-monk a hierodeacon. An elder, geron in Greek or starets in Russian, is an experienced monk sought out for spiritual counsel, a role that had enormous cultural weight in nineteenth century Russia and still does. Novices wear a simpler habit, and the full monastic habit is given in stages, with the great schema as the highest degree.

3. Greece: Athos, Meteora and Patmos

Three Greek sites dominate every list of Orthodox monasteries: Mount Athos, Meteora and Patmos. They are all Byzantine-rite houses in Greek, and they differ sharply in what they allow a visitor to do.

Mount Athos

Mount Athos is a self-governing monastic peninsula in northern Greece, the Holy Mountain, containing twenty ruling monasteries together with their sketes, kellia and hermitages. It is part of the Greek state and holds a special autonomous status under the Greek constitution, with its own administration seated at Karyes, while in church matters it is under the spiritual jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. The twenty houses have a fixed order of precedence, headed by the Great Lavra founded by Saint Athanasios the Athonite in the tenth century, and they include Greek, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Georgian and Romanian foundations, so the mountain has been an international Orthodox community for a thousand years.

Athos keeps the avaton, a rule barring women from the peninsula, which the community traces to the Mother of God as the Mountain's patroness and which is recognised in Greek law. Men who wish to visit need a permit issued by the Athonite pilgrims' office, the number issued each day is limited, and a smaller allocation is set aside for non-Orthodox visitors. Guests stay in the monasteries themselves, keep the community's hours, and are fed at the community's table. The offices are long, they run through the night on feasts, and the whole mountain uses the older Julian calendar for the fixed feasts and Byzantine time reckoned from sunset. Nothing about a visit is arranged for a visitor's convenience, and that is the point of it.

The special status of Athos is set out in Article 105 of the Constitution of Greece and in the Charter of the Holy Mountain. This page gives no figures for permit quotas or numbers of monks, because published figures vary and change.

Meteora

Meteora is a cluster of conglomerate rock pillars in Thessaly with monasteries built on their flat summits, six of them still inhabited, four by monks and two by nuns, under the Holy Metropolis of Stagoi and Meteora within the Church of Greece. Meteora receives everyone, women included, which makes it the practical alternative for anyone who cannot go to Athos. Access is by steps cut into the rock, dress rules are enforced at the gate, and the sixteenth century frescoes by Theophanes the Cretan and others are a major surviving body of Cretan school painting. Our full guide to the Meteora monasteries and what to know before visiting covers the six houses one by one.

Patmos

Patmos is a small island in the Dodecanese where the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian stands over the town of Chora, founded in 1088 by Saint Christodoulos under a chrysobull of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos, which granted him the island. The monastery is patriarchal and stavropegic, meaning it answers directly to the Ecumenical Patriarchate rather than to a local metropolitan. Below it is the Cave of the Apocalypse, venerated as the place where John received the Revelation, now enclosed in a chapel with the rock face visible. The island's claim rests on the text itself: John writes that he was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus (Revelation 1:9).

The monastery looks like a fortress because it was built as one, with high walls against raiders, and it holds a library of Byzantine manuscripts and a treasury of icons and imperial documents. The whole historic centre of Chora with the monastery and the cave is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. For readers who came here from the Book of Revelation rather than from monasticism, our page on the Book of Revelation and how Catholics read it covers the text, and the seven churches of Revelation covers the letters John sent from that island.

4. Other Greek Houses and Shrines

Greece holds a second tier of monasteries and shrines that draw very large numbers of Orthodox pilgrims and few foreign visitors. All of the following are in the Church of Greece except where noted, and all keep the Byzantine rite in Greek.

Tinos

Tinos, in the Cyclades, is a principal Marian pilgrimage centre in Greece. The Church of Panagia Evangelistria, Our Lady of the Annunciation, was built after an icon was found buried on the site in 1823, following visions reported by the nun Pelagia of the nearby Kechrovouni convent. Pilgrims arrive by ferry on 15 August, the Dormition of the Theotokos, and many climb the road from the harbour to the church on their knees. The Orthodox Church does not use the juridical categories that the Catholic Church applies to reported apparitions, so nothing about Tinos is described by its own church as approved or not approved in the Roman sense. Catholic readers looking for how Rome now handles such reports should see our page on Marian apparition sites and the 2024 Vatican norms, which sets out the six possible conclusions the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith can reach and applies them only to Catholic cases.

Corfu and Saint Spyridon

The relics of Saint Spyridon, the fourth century bishop of Trimythous in Cyprus who took part in the Council of Nicaea, rest in a church dedicated to him in Corfu town, where they were brought after the fall of Constantinople. The body lies in a silver reliquary and is carried in procession through the town several times a year on dates tied to deliverances the island attributes to the saint. Corfu was under Venetian rule for centuries, so the town also has a Catholic cathedral and a long history of Latin and Orthodox Christians living side by side, which makes it a useful place to think about the division rather than a comfortable one.

Thessaloniki

Thessaloniki is a city of Byzantine churches rather than a single monastery. The Church of Saint Demetrios stands over the crypt associated with the martyr's death and holds his relics. The Rotunda, Acheiropoietos, Panagia Chalkeon, Hosios David and the Vlatadon Monastery on the upper city form a group of paleochristian and Byzantine monuments inscribed by UNESCO in 1988. Vlatadon is a working monastery under the Ecumenical Patriarchate and is connected in local memory to Saint Gregory Palamas, whose relics are venerated in the metropolitan cathedral that bears his name. Saint Paul wrote two letters to the church in this city, and the second Sunday of Great Lent in the Orthodox calendar commemorates Palamas, so the city holds both ends of the tradition.

Hosios Loukas

Hosios Loukas, in Boeotia below Mount Helicon, is a monastery founded around the tomb of the tenth century hermit Saint Luke of Steiris. Its two linked churches carry an important surviving programme of middle Byzantine mosaic, and the site is inscribed by UNESCO together with Daphni near Athens and Nea Moni on Chios as a group of monasteries representing that period of Byzantine art. The house is small, quiet and still inhabited, and it gives a clearer picture of an ordinary Byzantine monastic plan than the dramatic sites do.

Patras

The Church of Saint Andrew in Patras, on the northern coast of the Peloponnese, is built where tradition places the apostle's martyrdom. It holds relics of Saint Andrew, including the head, which Pope Paul VI returned to the Orthodox Church of Greece in 1964 after it had been kept in Rome since the fifteenth century. That return is one of the concrete ecumenical gestures of the 1960s and it is remembered in Patras as such. The doctrinal question behind those gestures is treated on our page about ecumenism and what the Catholic Church seeks in Christian unity, which this guide leaves to that page rather than reopening here.

Aegina and Saint Nektarios

Saint Nektarios of Aegina died in 1920 and was glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1961, which makes him one of the most recently canonised saints with a large international following. He spent his last years at the Holy Trinity convent he founded on Aegina, an island close to Athens, and both the convent and the large church built nearby receive a steady stream of pilgrims. His life includes years of unjust suspicion and removal from office in Egypt, which is part of why he is invoked by people who have been treated unfairly.

5. Bulgaria: Rila and Bachkovo

Bulgaria's two great monasteries, Rila and Bachkovo, belong to the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, an autocephalous patriarchate in communion with Constantinople. Both are working houses, both receive visitors, and both are national symbols in a country where the monasteries preserved the language and the liturgy through five centuries of Ottoman rule.

Rila Monastery

Rila Monastery, the Monastery of Saint John of Rila, sits in a valley of the Rila Mountains southwest of Sofia and is a large walled complex built around a single church. Its founder in tradition is Saint John of Rila, a tenth century hermit whose cave is up the valley from the present complex and who is the patron saint of the Bulgarian people; his relics rest in the main church. The oldest standing structure is the stone tower built in 1335 by the local lord Hrelyo, with a chapel at its top. Most of what a visitor sees is nineteenth century, because the complex burned in 1833 and was rebuilt by subscription across the Bulgarian lands, with arcaded galleries in black and white stone and a church covered inside and out with frescoes, some of them by the painter Zahari Zograf. UNESCO inscribed Rila on the World Heritage List in 1983.

The rebuilding matters historically. It happened in the decades of the Bulgarian National Revival, when the monastery worked as a centre of literacy and manuscript copying as well as prayer, and the community understood the reconstruction as a national act as well as a religious one. A visitor who reads the frescoes will find the usual Last Judgment on the outer wall of the narthex, painted where everyone entering has to walk past it.

Bachkovo Monastery

Bachkovo, in the Rhodope Mountains south of Plovdiv, was founded in 1083 by Gregory Pakourianos, a Byzantine general of Georgian origin, and its original typikon survives in Georgian, Greek and Armenian versions, which tells you how mixed the Byzantine world's monastic population was. The house was Georgian in its early centuries and later became Bulgarian. Its most venerated object is an icon of the Theotokos with a Georgian inscription, carried in procession on Easter Monday from the monastery up to a chapel on the hillside, in a procession that draws crowds from across the region. The ossuary church a short walk from the main complex keeps eleventh and twelfth century frescoes and is the oldest surviving part.

6. Serbia and Montenegro: Studenica and Ostrog

The Serbian Orthodox Church is an autocephalous patriarchate seated in Belgrade, and its medieval monasteries are the core of Serbian national memory as well as its liturgical life. Two houses draw the most pilgrims: Studenica for its history and its architecture, Ostrog for its saint.

Studenica

Studenica, in central Serbia, was founded around 1190 by Stefan Nemanja, the grand prince who founded the Nemanjic dynasty, and who later became a monk under the name Simeon and died on Mount Athos at Hilandar, the Serbian monastery there. His relics were brought back to Studenica by his son, Saint Sava, the first archbishop of the Serbian Church, and they rest in the Church of the Virgin. The two main churches are built of white marble in a style that fuses Byzantine plans with Romanesque carving, and the Church of the Virgin holds frescoes of 1208 to 1209, including a Crucifixion that is one of the landmarks of Byzantine painting. The King's Church, added in 1314 by King Milutin, holds a celebrated cycle of the life of the Virgin. UNESCO inscribed Studenica in 1986. The house is inhabited and the offices are sung daily.

Ostrog

Ostrog is built into a vertical cliff face in Montenegro, its white chapels set into caves in the rock, and it holds the relics of Saint Basil of Ostrog, a seventeenth century metropolitan who took refuge there and died in 1671. Ostrog draws pilgrims from across the Balkans through the year, and it is visited by Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Muslims alike, who come to ask the saint's intercession for healing. The Upper Monastery, with the cave churches and the reliquary, is reached above the Lower Monastery, and many pilgrims walk the road up on foot as an act of penance, some of them barefoot. The Serbian Orthodox Church administers the site.

Ostrog is worth attention for Catholic readers because of who turns up there. The cross-confessional traffic is a real feature of the shrine, and the community accepts it without pretending that the differences are settled. That is a healthier model than either hostility or a false claim that everyone believes the same thing.

7. Decani and the Churches of Ohrid

Two entries on most Balkan monastery lists carry live political complications, and the honest thing is to state them briefly and factually. Visoki Decani sits in Kosovo, whose status is disputed between Belgrade and Pristina, and the churches of Ohrid sit in North Macedonia, where the jurisdiction question was resolved in 2022.

Visoki Decani

Visoki Decani is a Serbian Orthodox monastery in western Kosovo, founded in 1327 by King Stefan Uros III, known as Stefan Decanski, and completed under his son. The UNESCO World Heritage Centre listing describes its church as the largest medieval church in the Balkans, holding the most extensive preserved medieval fresco painting in the region. The founder's relics rest inside it. The monastery is inhabited by a Serbian Orthodox community.

The complications are these. Kosovo declared independence in 2008, Serbia does not recognise it, and the monastery lies inside territory whose sovereignty the two governments dispute. UNESCO inscribed Decani in 2004 as part of the group Medieval Monuments in Kosovo and placed that group on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2006. The monastery has been under the protection of the NATO-led Kosovo Force since 1999. Litigation over land adjoining the monastery has run for years through Kosovo institutions. Those are the facts on the record, and this page takes no side between the parties and identifies no group as a wrongdoer. A visitor should understand that access is controlled by a military protection arrangement and can change without notice.

Sources for this section: the UNESCO World Heritage Centre listing for Medieval Monuments in Kosovo, inscribed 2004 and placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2006, which is also the source of the description of the church quoted above, and the published mandate of the Kosovo Force. No figure for visitor numbers is given because none is published.

Ohrid

Ohrid, on the lake of the same name in North Macedonia, was the seat from which Saints Clement and Naum, disciples of Saints Cyril and Methodius, taught Slavonic letters and liturgy in the ninth and tenth centuries. Saint Clement's foundation on the Plaosnik terrace, the Church of Saint Sophia with its eleventh century frescoes, the small Church of Saint John at Kaneo above the lake and the Monastery of Saint Naum along the shore are the main sites. The lake and the town together are inscribed by UNESCO in a rare mixed listing for both natural and cultural value.

The jurisdiction was contested for decades. The Macedonian Orthodox Church, Ohrid Archbishopric, declared autocephaly unilaterally in 1967 and was not recognised by the other Orthodox churches, which left it outside communion for fifty-five years. In May 2022 the Ecumenical Patriarchate received it into communion, and the Serbian Orthodox Church recognised its autocephaly the same month. The practical effect for a visitor is that the churches of Ohrid are now served by a church in communion with the rest of Eastern Orthodoxy. Our page on the autocephalous Orthodox churches and how autocephaly is granted explains the mechanism behind that kind of decision.

8. Romania: Painted Monasteries and Prislop

Romania has more working monasteries and more monastics than most Orthodox countries, and its northern province of Bucovina holds a group of sixteenth century churches painted on the outside as well as the inside. The Romanian Orthodox Church is an autocephalous patriarchate seated in Bucharest and it uses Romanian, a Romance language, in the Byzantine liturgy.

The painted monasteries of Bucovina

The painted churches of northern Moldavia were built and decorated under Stephen the Great, who ruled to 1504, and his successor Petru Rares, and their distinguishing feature is a complete programme of frescoes covering the exterior walls, painted so that people standing outside a small church could read the whole of salvation history. Voronet, founded in 1488 and painted in the 1530s, carries a Last Judgment across its west wall against a blue so distinctive that art historians call it Voronet blue. Sucevita has a Ladder of Virtue climbing its north wall and is the last and most extensive of the group. Moldovita carries a Siege of Constantinople. Humor, Arbore, Probota and Patrauti complete the group inscribed by UNESCO in 1993 as the Churches of Moldavia, together with the church of Saint George in Suceava; Sucevita was added to that inscription in 2010. Voronet, Sucevita, Moldovita and Humor are inhabited by communities of nuns or monks and are working houses rather than museums.

The exterior painting has a preaching purpose that is easy to underrate. A largely illiterate rural population came to a church too small to hold them, stood outside during the liturgy, and looked at the wall. What is on the wall is a catechism: the genealogy of Christ, the lives of the saints, the hymn of the Akathist to the Theotokos, and the judgment. The frescoes survived four and a half centuries of northern weather, which is itself remarkable and not fully explained.

Prislop and Arsenie Boca

Prislop Monastery, in Hunedoara County in Transylvania, is a Romanian Orthodox house of ancient foundation that now receives enormous numbers of pilgrims because of one grave. Arsenie Boca, a priest, monk and painter who died in 1989, is buried there, and his tomb has become a major devotional destination in Romania, with queues of pilgrims who leave written petitions and speak of answered prayers.

His status should be stated plainly. Arsenie Boca has not been glorified as a saint by the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church. Popular devotion runs far ahead of any official act, examination of his life and writings has been reported at diocesan level, and the case is disputed within the Romanian Church itself, both over the evidence and over his associations in the political climate of interwar Romania. Some Romanian clergy and theologians have publicly questioned elements of his teaching. A pilgrim can pray at the grave and should describe him for what he is at present, an unglorified figure of very large popular devotion whose cause is contested. Anyone who tells you the matter is settled is ahead of the Synod.

The statement that Arsenie Boca has not been glorified reflects the absence of any act of glorification by the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church. This page names no accuser and no defender, and it reports the existence of the dispute rather than adjudicating it.

9. Ukraine: Kyiv, Pochaiv and Zarvanytsia

Kyiv is where Christianity entered the Slavic east, and its monastic sites are correspondingly old. Two of them, the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra and the Pochaiv Lavra, are also the subject of a live jurisdictional and legal dispute in Ukraine, which a visitor should know about before arriving and which this page reports factually.

Kyiv Pechersk Lavra

The Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, the Monastery of the Caves, was founded in 1051 by Saint Anthony, a monk formed on Mount Athos, and organised by Saint Theodosius, who introduced a coenobitic rule. Its distinguishing feature is the system of caves cut into the hillside above the Dnipro, the Near Caves and the Far Caves, where the incorrupt relics of generations of monks lie in niches along the passages and are venerated by pilgrims carrying candles. The Paterikon of the Caves, the collection of lives of its early monks, is one of the foundational texts of Slavic Christianity. UNESCO inscribed the Lavra together with Saint Sophia in Kyiv in 1990.

The complication is jurisdictional. The site is state property, administered as a national reserve, and its churches have been used by monastic communities under lease arrangements. Ukraine has two Orthodox bodies with claims on the country's monastic patrimony: the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which received a tomos of autocephaly from the Ecumenical Patriarchate in January 2019 and which the Moscow Patriarchate does not recognise, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, historically linked to Moscow and which declared its full independence in May 2022. In 2023 the state ended the tenancy arrangement under which the Ukrainian Orthodox Church community used parts of the Lavra, litigation followed, and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine has served in some of the churches since. The dispute is unresolved, access arrangements have changed more than once, and Ukraine is at war, which conditions everything. This page names no villain and takes no side; a reader planning anything should check current conditions directly.

Saint Sophia of Kyiv

Saint Sophia's Cathedral was built in the eleventh century under Yaroslav the Wise and holds a major surviving ensemble of eleventh century mosaics and frescoes, including the standing Virgin of the apse known as the Unbreakable Wall. The building functions as a museum reserve rather than as a parish church, and services in it are occasional and negotiated. It is the anchor of the UNESCO listing that includes the Lavra.

Pochaiv Lavra

The Dormition Lavra of Pochaiv, in Ternopil region in western Ukraine, is built on a hill where tradition holds that the Mother of God appeared to monks and left a footprint in the rock, from which a spring flows; the footprint and the Pochaiv icon of the Theotokos are the two centres of devotion. Its history crosses the confessional line: the monastery was held by the Basilian order of the Greek Catholic Church from 1713 until 1831, when it was transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church, and its printing press served both in turn. It is presently used by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and like the Kyiv Lavra it stands on state-owned land whose lease has been the subject of legal proceedings. The same caution applies.

Zarvanytsia

Zarvanytsia, also in Ternopil region, is a Marian shrine of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which is an Eastern Catholic church in full communion with Rome that keeps the Byzantine rite in Ukrainian. The site is built around a spring and an icon of the Mother of God of Zarvanytsia venerated as miraculous, and it draws very large pilgrimages, particularly in July. Zarvanytsia belongs in a guide like this one for contrast: the rite, the icons, the singing and the shape of the liturgy are Byzantine, and the communion is Catholic. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was suppressed by the Soviet state in 1946 and operated underground until 1989, and Zarvanytsia was one of the sites where the revival was made public. See our page on the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church for that history.

10. Russia: Five Monastic Centres

Russian monasticism produced five houses that anyone reading about Orthodox spirituality will meet repeatedly: Sergiev Posad, Optina, Valaam, Solovki and Diveyevo. All belong to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Moscow Patriarchate. All were closed under the Soviet state and reopened in the late twentieth century, and the closure is part of their history rather than a footnote to it.

Trinity Lavra of Saint Sergius, Sergiev Posad

The Trinity Lavra of Saint Sergius, north of Moscow, was founded in the fourteenth century by Saint Sergius of Radonezh, who withdrew into the forest to live alone and attracted a community that reformed Russian monastic life around a common rule. His relics rest in the Trinity Cathedral, which is the oldest building in the complex. Andrei Rublev painted the icon of the Holy Trinity, the three angels at Abraham's table, in honour of Saint Sergius for that cathedral; the original has been moved several times in the last century and its custody has changed, so a visitor should not assume where it will be. The Lavra is the seat of the Moscow Theological Academy and the historic spiritual centre of Russian Orthodoxy. UNESCO inscribed the ensemble in 1993.

Optina Pustyn

Optina Pustyn, near Kozelsk south of Moscow, is the house that made the Russian elder a national figure. In the nineteenth century a succession of startsy at its skete, Leonid, Macarius, Ambrose and others, received a stream of visitors from every class of Russian society and gave spiritual counsel in a form that was neither formal confession nor casual conversation. Gogol, Dostoevsky, Solovyov and Tolstoy all went there. Dostoevsky's visit after the death of his son fed directly into the elder Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov, which is why the monastery has a place in world literature as well as in church history. The monastery was closed in 1923 and returned to the Church in 1987, and monastic life resumed.

Valaam

Valaam is an archipelago in Lake Ladoga in northwestern Russia, with the Transfiguration Monastery on the main island and sketes scattered across the others. It gave its name to a distinctive style of chant, and its position on a hard northern lake made it a byword for austerity. When the border moved during the Winter War of 1939 to 1940 the community evacuated to Finland and founded New Valamo in Heinavesi, which is still a working monastery of the Finnish Orthodox Church, an autonomous church under the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Monastic life on the Russian islands resumed at the end of the 1980s. Two monasteries now carry the name, and both are legitimate heirs of the same community.

Solovki

The Solovetsky Monastery stands on an island in the White Sea a little south of the Arctic Circle, founded in the fifteenth century by the monks Savvatiy, German and Zosima, and built up into a walled fortress of enormous boulders that withstood sieges. Its second history is the reason many people know the name: after 1923 the Soviet state used the monastery as the Solovki special-purpose camp, an early and formative institution of the labour camp system, and large numbers of prisoners, including many clergy, died there. The Russian Orthodox Church venerates a body of new martyrs and confessors associated with the islands. Monastic life resumed in 1990 and the site is inscribed by UNESCO. A visitor is standing in a monastery and in a place of mass death at the same time, and the community does not hide either.

Diveyevo

The Serafimo-Diveyevsky convent at Diveyevo, in Nizhny Novgorod region, holds the relics of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, the hermit and elder who died in 1833 and was canonised in 1903. Seraphim took a special care for the community of women at Diveyevo and directed the digging of a shallow ditch and rampart around part of the grounds, the Holy Canal, which pilgrims walk while praying the Rule of the Theotokos, a set of one hundred and fifty repetitions of the Angelic Salutation. Diveyevo is a very large women's community and a major pilgrimage destination in Russia. Catholic readers will notice the resemblance between that walked rule of one hundred and fifty salutations and the Latin Rosary, which developed on the same Psalter arithmetic in the West.

11. Georgia: Mtskheta, Bodbe and Gelati

The Georgian Orthodox and Apostolic Church is an autocephalous patriarchate in communion with Constantinople, and it is Chalcedonian, which means it belongs to the Eastern Orthodox family rather than to the Oriental Orthodox one despite its position in the Caucasus alongside Armenia. Georgian churches use the Georgian language and the Georgian script in the liturgy, and their architecture, with high conical drums over cross-plan churches, is distinct from the Greek and Slavic types.

Mtskheta

Mtskheta, the old capital north of Tbilisi, is the spiritual centre of Georgia. Svetitskhoveli Cathedral, the Cathedral of the Living Pillar, is the seat of the Catholicos-Patriarch and is built over the site where Georgian tradition holds that the robe of Christ was buried with a Jewish woman of Mtskheta named Sidonia, with the pillar of the church's name growing from her grave. The present building is eleventh century. On the ridge above the confluence of the Aragvi and the Mtkvari stands the Jvari church, a sixth century monastery church built where Saint Nino is said to have raised a wooden cross when the Georgian king converted in the fourth century. The Samtavro convent in the town holds the tombs of King Mirian and Queen Nana, the first Christian rulers. The Historical Monuments of Mtskheta are inscribed by UNESCO.

Bodbe

The Bodbe convent near Sighnaghi in Kakheti, eastern Georgia, is built over the tomb of Saint Nino, the woman who according to Georgian tradition brought Christianity to the kingdom of Kartli in the fourth century and whose cross of vine wood bound with her own hair is the emblem of the Georgian Church. Bodbe is a working convent of nuns, there is a spring associated with the saint below the ridge, and the site draws pilgrims from across Georgia because Nino is the country's founding Christian figure.

Gelati

Gelati Monastery, near Kutaisi in western Georgia, was founded in 1106 by King David IV, called the Builder, who is buried at its gate. It housed an academy of philosophy and theology that translated and taught the Greek Christian and classical inheritance in Georgian, and contemporaries called it a second Athens. The main church holds a large mosaic of the Theotokos in the apse and layers of wall painting from the twelfth century onward. UNESCO inscribes Gelati as a World Heritage site in its own right. The monastery is active.

12. Dress, Silence and the Gate

Orthodox monasteries expect modest dress and quiet conduct, and most of them enforce it at the entrance. Shoulders and knees covered applies to everyone. Men wear long trousers. Women wear a skirt below the knee, and in Slavic and Georgian houses a headscarf is normally expected in church. Many monasteries keep a rack of wrap skirts and scarves at the gate for visitors who arrive without them, and no offence is taken in borrowing one.

Inside the church

Men remove hats. Voices drop. Hands stay out of pockets, and crossing your arms or standing with your back to the sanctuary reads as rude in Greek and Slavic practice. There are usually few seats, because Orthodox worshippers stand for long services, using the stalls along the walls when they need them. Do not walk in front of someone who is praying before an icon, and do not walk across the front of the iconostasis during a service. If a service begins while you are inside, either stay still or leave quietly by the way you came.

Photography

Assume photography is forbidden inside the church until you see a sign or are told otherwise. Many houses allow it in the courtyard and forbid it in the katholikon, some forbid it everywhere, and monks and nuns generally do not wish to be photographed. A camera pointed at someone at prayer is the fastest way to be remembered badly.

Candles, icons and relics

Lighting a candle is a normal act of prayer and visitors are welcome to do it, usually with a small offering in the box beside the stand. Venerating an icon is done by making the sign of the cross twice, bowing, kissing the icon on the hand or the feet or the garment rather than the face, and crossing yourself again. A Catholic may do all of this. Reliquaries are venerated the same way. Note that Orthodox Christians cross themselves right shoulder first, which is the reverse of the Latin practice, and no one will mind if you keep your own habit.

Hospitality

Many houses offer arriving pilgrims something small, coffee, water, a spoonful of preserve, a piece of loukoumi. Take it. Refusing hospitality is a real slight in Greek and Balkan monastic culture. Guesthouses exist at many monasteries and usually work on donation with a request that guests attend at least some of the services and keep the house's hours. If you stay, keep them.

Speaking about differences

You will sometimes meet a monk with hard views about Catholics, and occasionally one who will tell you so. The useful response is courtesy and brevity. A monastery gate is a poor place for a debate about the filioque or the papacy, both of which are real disagreements with long literatures behind them. Our pages on the Great Schism of 1054 and the filioque and why it divided East and West are where that argument belongs.

13. Communion and the Catholic Visitor

A Catholic at an Orthodox monastery does not receive communion in ordinary circumstances. The Catholic Church recognises that the Orthodox churches have valid orders, a valid Eucharist and apostolic succession, and the Second Vatican Council's decree on ecumenism said so explicitly of the Eastern churches. Catholic law permits a Catholic to receive the Eucharist, penance and anointing from a non-Catholic minister whose church has valid sacraments, where necessity or genuine spiritual advantage requires it and access to a Catholic minister is physically or morally impossible. The same law directs that the discipline of the other church be respected, and Orthodox discipline generally restricts communion to Orthodox Christians.

The practical upshot at a monastery is simple. Stand, pray, sing if you know the tone, venerate what is offered for veneration, and stay in your place when the faithful approach the chalice. Nobody will think worse of you, and presenting yourself would put the priest in a position he did not ask for.

Antidoron and blessed bread

At the end of the Divine Liturgy the priest distributes antidoron, bread that was blessed and cut at the preparation of the gifts and which is not the Eucharist. Practice on whether non-Orthodox may receive it varies by church, by country and by house. Watch what happens, and if you are unsure, ask a member of the community rather than guessing.

What Catholics and Orthodox already share

The shared ground is large. Seven sacraments, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, apostolic succession, the intercession of the saints, prayer for the dead, the veneration of icons defined at Nicaea II in 787, the Theotokos as Mother of God defined at Ephesus in 431, and the first seven ecumenical councils entire. The live disagreements are the primacy and jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome, the filioque clause in the Creed, and a set of consequences that follow from those. Anyone who wants the theology of the division and of reunion should read our page on ecumenism and the Catholic search for Christian unity, which is the page that owns that argument on this site.

14. Planning a Monastic Pilgrimage

Planning an Orthodox monastic pilgrimage means working around the community's calendar rather than your own. Monasteries close their churches for their own services, keep fasts that affect what is served in the guesthouse, and observe feasts on which the crowds are immense and the offices run for many hours.

Calendars

Some Orthodox churches use the revised Julian calendar for fixed feasts, which matches the civil date, and others keep the old Julian calendar, which currently runs thirteen days behind. Mount Athos, the Russian Orthodox Church, the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Georgian Orthodox Church keep the old calendar. The Churches of Greece, Bulgaria and Romania use the revised calendar for fixed feasts. Pascha is calculated on the older reckoning across all of them, so Orthodox Easter frequently falls on a different Sunday from the Western one. Check the calendar of the specific church before assuming a date.

Fasting seasons

Orthodox fasting is stricter and longer than the Latin practice, with four fasting seasons in the year and most Wednesdays and Fridays kept as well. In a monastic guesthouse during Great Lent or the Dormition fast the food will be plain, and often without oil on the strictest days. Eat what is given, quietly.

Great feasts to know

The Dormition of the Theotokos on 15 August is the principal pilgrimage day at Tinos and at many Marian houses. Pascha and Bright Week fill every monastery. The patronal feast of an individual house, its panegyri, is when that community is at full strength and at its most welcoming, and it is also when there will be no room. Transfiguration on 6 August has a particular weight in monastic houses because of the theology of the uncreated light in the hesychast tradition.

Access, permits and enclosure

Mount Athos requires a permit and admits men only. Some convents restrict access to parts of the enclosure. Some houses close the church between services. Some sites, notably the ones named in sections seven and nine of this guide, sit inside disputed or wartime conditions where access arrangements change. Nothing on this page should be treated as a guarantee that a given church will be open on a given day. This guide gives no opening times, ticket prices, ferry schedules, tour operators or visa rules, because those change constantly and a page that carries them is wrong within a year.

If you cannot go

Most readers of this page will visit none of these monasteries, and the tradition itself says the journey was never the point on its own. Our guide to what a pilgrimage is and what the Church teaches about it sets out how a journey is meant to change the person who makes it, making a pilgrimage without leaving home covers what to do when travel is impossible, and the directory of Christian pilgrimage sites lists the other destinations covered here, including the Holy Land sites and Jasna Gora at Czestochowa.

15. Frequently Asked Questions