Pochaevsko-Uspenskaia Laura

Pochaevsko-Uspenskaia Laura 

a monastery (until 1833) in the village of Pochaev (present-day Kremenets Raion, Ternopol’ Oblast). The Pochaevsko-Uspenskaia Laura was first mentioned in 16th-century historical sources. In the mid-16th century, the owner of the village of Pochaev, a woman named Goiskaia, bequeathed the monastery some lands and forests. She also built a stone church in 1579. By the mid-17th century, the monastery owned lands not only near Pochaev but also around the neighboring villages. In 1618, a printshop, publishing mainly theological literature, was established at the monastery.

Under the Armistice of Andrusovo (1667), the monastery became part of the Rzecz Pospolita. This foreshadowed the Uniates’ victory in their struggle against the Orthodox Church, since the Polish government supported the Uniates.

In the early 18th century, the monastery was put under the jurisdiction of the Basilian monastic order, a Uniate order named after St. Basil the Great, which was founded in Poland in the 17th century. After Volyn’ became part of the Russian Empire in 1795, the monastery remained in the hands of the Uniates. However, as a result of the participation of the monks in the Polish Uprising of 1830–31, the monastery was transferred to the Orthodox Church. In 1833 it received the status of a laura.

In 1887 the Pochaevsko-Uspenskaia Laura began publication of the reactionary journal Pochaevskii listok (Pochaev Sheet), which in 1906 became the organ of the ultrareactionary League of the Russian People. During the Civil War of 1918–20 and the period in which the Western Ukraine was under the control of bourgeois-landlord Poland, the laura was a center of anti-Soviet propaganda. After the Western Ukraine became part of the USSR, an Orthodox monastery was organized on the territory of the Pochaevsko-Uspenskaia Laura. Architectural monuments include the Uspenskii Cathedral (1771–91; architect G. Hoffmann) and the Troitskii Cathedral (1906; architect A. V, Shchusev). A museum of atheism was opened in the laura in 1959.

REFERENCE

Andrievs’kii, V. P. Pro pochaivs’ku Lavru. Kiev, 1960.