The Blessed Stone

Archaeologists surveying the ground around Manyava in 1977–79 dug at the foot of a boulder in the forest and came up with stone tools of the Mesolithic. People were sheltering under this rock thousands of years before any monk found it, and it is still in use: icons, candles and cut flowers sit in the grotto, and the monks of Manyava Skete keep it tended.

It lies about a kilometre from the monastery along an easy forest path, and most people who come to the skete walk out to it. Do. It is the quieter half of the visit and the half that explains the other.

What it actually is

A single slab of rock roughly 10 m long and 3 m high, tipped against the hillside so that a natural niche opens underneath. The niche runs about 4 m across and 1.5 m high and bites some 2 m into the slope: enough for two men to sleep out of the weather, not much more. Water seeps from beneath the stone the year round.

That grotto is the cave hermitage the whole Manyava story starts from. The first monks lived in it while the monastery was going up — they hung a door across the opening, cut a path through the scrub and planted a garden in front of the rock.

Older than the monastery by a very long way

The Prykarpattia archaeological expedition of the Academy of Sciences examined the grotto between 1977 and 1979, running alongside the restoration work at the skete, and recovered stone tools attributed to the Mesolithic. Some researchers think a pagan sanctuary stood here before any Christian used it — a reasonable guess for a sheltered rock with a spring under it, and a guess is what it remains.

The written record is firmer. Ivan Vahylevych, Yakiv Holovatskyi, Antin Mohylnytskyi and Yulian Tselevych all wrote about the stone and its water in the 19th century. Vahylevych put the first hermits here in 1281, and Ivan Franko later called them the first apostles of the Carpathian foothills. The phrase stuck.

The water, and what people say about it

The spring is why the rock is venerated rather than merely old. Pilgrims wash their eyes in it — the belief that it helps eyesight is the most persistent of the lot — and carry it home in bottles. Tradition holds that the monks steeped mountain herbs in this water and treated the sick with it, and that word of the cures travelled far enough to bring envoys from European courts up the valley. Other beliefs attach to the grotto: that a childless couple who spend a night in it will have a child, that touching the stone in genuine repentance brings relief.

One story is worth repeating for its shape rather than its truth — that the spring dried up when the monastery was closed in 1785 and ran again only when it reopened. None of this is testable, and none of it has to be. People have been praying at this rock for a very long time, and on a weekday with nobody else on the path you can feel the weight of that without signing up to any of it.

The legend of the weighed water

The founding legend is odd enough to be worth telling straight. Two monks are sent out from the Kyiv Caves Lavra after the Mongols wreck it: one carries a gold cross, the other a vessel of water from the Lavra spring and a set of scales. They are to weigh the local water everywhere they stop, and to found a new house wherever it comes out at the same weight.

Near Solotvyn a young fisherman invites them into his cave to rest. He is not a fisherman; the door slams behind them, and when they bless the wine he pours the room fills with devils. One monk holds the gold cross to the door and it flies open; the other drives the crowd back with holy water until it burrows an underground passage surfacing at what is now Manyava. Separated in the confusion, the two spend months searching the forests for each other. Then they weigh the water here, and it matches.

The walk from the skete

Start at the monastery gate. A forest path runs past the old monastery lake and up the valley to the southeast until it reaches a covered wooden footbridge with a sign on it: 300 metres to the Blessed Stone. Cross, climb the path up the slope, and take the right-hand fork about halfway up.

Reckon on twenty minutes. It needs no map and no mountain kit — plenty of people who arrived at the skete with no intention of walking anywhere manage it — but it wants shoes with grip after rain, because the path is bare earth and turns greasy. Bring a clean bottle if you mean to take water. And keep the noise down: people come here to pray, and the silence is most of what the place has.