Pskovo-Pechersky Dormition Monastery

The Pskov-Caves Monastery is built into and around a ravine: its churches, crowned by bright domes in the Ukrainian Baroque manner, crowd the hollow cut by the Kamenets stream, ringed by fortress walls with six towers. Beneath it lie the caves that give it its name, passages dug into sandstone that tradition calls "created by God", and that serve to this day as the monastery's burial ground. It is also one of the few Russian monasteries never to have been closed at any point in its history.

Monastic tradition records that the caves became known to local people in the late 14th century, and that around 1470 a priest named Ioann, who had served in Yuryev, today's Tartu, settled here, helped by his wife Maria, who later took vows as Vassa. He dug the cave church of the Dormition into the hillside, and it was consecrated in 1473; Ioann took monastic vows as Jonah and is venerated as one of the founders. The church still has only a front facade, the rest of it lying inside the hill. The real flowering came under the abbot Kornily in the mid-16th century, who extended the caves, built new churches and, in 1558–1565, surrounded the monastery with stone walls and towers. Standing on the border with Livonia, the monastery became a fortress: it held out against the army of Stefan Batory in 1581–1582 and against Polish and Swedish attacks in the early 17th century. Between 1920 and 1944 Pechory belonged to Estonia, and this kept the monastery out of reach of early Soviet closures.

The ensemble gathers buildings of several centuries. The Dormition cave church is the oldest; above it the Church of the Protection was added in 1758–1759; the Cathedral of Saint Michael was built in 1815–1827 to commemorate Pskov's deliverance from Napoleon's armies; and the gate church of Saint Nicholas, dated to the 1560s, rises over the entrance. East of the Dormition church stands the great belfry, begun in 1523, a multi-arched wall of stone piers in the Pskov tradition, carrying a collection of more than thirty bells. The caves themselves divide into near caves, holding the tombs of the venerated founders, and far caves, a network of seven underground galleries some 200 metres long at a steady temperature around 10°C, where monks and lay benefactors, including ancestors of Pushkin, Kutuzov and Mussorgsky, have been laid to rest in niches in the walls. Some ninety monks live here today.

Getting there

The monastery is in the town of Pechory in Pskov Oblast, a few kilometres from the Estonian border, about 43 km west of Pskov in a straight line. The nearest airport is Pskov (PKV), about 46 km away.