Bakota Cave Monastery

The caves in the face of Bila Hora are the last part of Bakota still above water. Monks cut them about 70m up a limestone cliff that rises some 130m from the river, and the town they served lay on the flat ground below. That ground is now under the Dnister: the bay in front of you is 1.7km across and drops to around 34m in low water.

Bakota was not a hamlet. A chronicle names it in 1240, when it was the administrative centre of the Ponyzzia lands under the princes of Halych and Volhynia. What survives is the rock — three caves and an altar niche, dedicated to the Archangel Michael, the oldest and best-preserved of Podillia's cave monasteries. Nobody lives here now, but the caves stay open to anyone who walks up.

The town under the bay

The dam went up downstream at Novodnistrovsk. Water began rising on 24 October 1981; three days later Bakota was struck off the register of settlements, and the reservoir filled until July 1987. Around 2,500 people were moved out. They had been told eight years in advance, they objected, and it changed nothing.

Twenty-eight settlements along this stretch of river went under, with them some 16,000 hectares of farmland and the orchards that gave the valley its old name, the Golden Valley. Part of the caves slid into the new water, taking princely-era frescoes down. Guidebooks call the place Ukraine's Atlantis. People whose parents were moved out of it use plainer language.

Cut into the cliff

Up to two dozen cave monasteries are counted in the Dnister bluffs of Podillia — communities who hollowed cells out of the soft limestone rather than building on it. Bakota is the largest and best preserved, around 760 square metres. Its heart is a ledge roughly 40m by 10m, with the cave mouths opening off it and running 7–9m into the rock.

The three run 8.5m, 6m and 10m deep, the longest ending in a broad chamber. Seventeen elongated niches are cut into the side walls, each 1.6–1.9m — the length of a body — and 19 graves into the floor, some holding human bone. That ratio is why some archaeologists read the place as a necropolis as much as a set of cells. The niche with the egg-shaped vault is taken to be the altar of the underground church, and scraps of fresco survive: a soldier-martyr, and two women.

Abbot Hryhorii, and the man who found him

Almost nothing here is documented. The dedication and the name of the first abbot, Hryhorii, come from Old Rus inscriptions carved into the rock at the turn of the 11th and 12th centuries — the stone is the archive. Exactly one written source mentions the place, the 16th-century Bychovets Chronicle, in passing. The monastery ran from no earlier than the mid-12th century to no later than the mid-15th, when Bakota was sacked and the monks scattered. Tradition puts Antoniy of the Caves here, praying on his way home from Athos.

The rediscovery was accidental. In 1883 the Kyiv archaeologist Volodymyr Antonovych climbed Bila Hora after hearing villagers talk about a tract they called Monastyrske, and came back in 1891–92 for the Imperial Archaeological Commission. A rockfall had sealed the ruins centuries earlier, which is the only reason anything was left to find.

Wrecked twice

A wooden church went up on the ledge in 1893, consecrated on the Maccabees' feast, 14 August, which has been Bakota's patronal day ever since. In 1963–64 the Soviet authorities pulled it down: bells, icons and crosses went into the Dnister, and the monastery library was burned. The reservoir followed within twenty years.

Rebuilding started in the 1990s, led by the local community. There is no permanent monastic life — inside is an improvised altar and a wall of icons, most of them modern, carried up after the closure. Every 14 August a liturgy draws thousands: descendants of the drowned village, and people from the settlements that stayed dry.

The walk up, and what's below

The site is in Kamianets-Podilskyi district of Khmelnytskyi oblast, inside Podilski Tovtry National Nature Park; the nearest living village is Horaivka. From Kamianets-Podilskyi it is about 40km on the Stara Ushytsia road, with a signposted turn between Hrushka and Stara Ushytsia — marshrutkas that way drop you at it, leaving a few kilometres on foot. Entry is ticketed at the kiosk by the car park.

The path starts at the park entrance, passes the Bila Hora viewpoint and carries green waymarks; it is steep and slippery after rain. Three springs run below the monastery, each credited with curing a particular ailment; the ribbons and icons tied beside them are other people's thanks. Lower down, a path drops to Bilohirskyi beach, screened by trees, where in season you can swim or hire a boat. Come late in the day, when the sun sets over the water. And bear in mind that people pray in these caves.