Manyava Skete

By 1628 the monastery in this narrow wooded gorge had 556 houses under its authority, from Galicia and Podillia to Moldavia and Wallachia, and answered to no bishop in Ukraine — only to the Patriarch in Constantinople. That is an odd thing to find at the end of a village road 45 km south of Ivano-Frankivsk, and it explains the nickname the place has carried ever since: the Ukrainian Athos.

Manyava Skete, the monastery of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, is the oldest Orthodox house in the Carpathians. A Turkish army sacked it, an Austrian emperor shut it, and it stood as a ruin for most of two centuries before monks came back in 1998. It is busy now, so come on a weekday morning.

A monastery built like a fort

The first thing you notice from the road is that this is not a church with a fence round it. Stone walls and square towers enclose a narrow shelf of hillside, and the tallest of them — the four-tier treasury tower of 1620, 22.7 m — has slit windows meant for shooting out of rather than looking through. Three towers held the perimeter: the Treasury, the Archers' and the Bell tower. For generations the skete doubled as the refuge for the villages below whenever raiders came up the valley. Sanctuary and stronghold at once, which is what sets it apart from almost every other monastery in the region.

Athos in the Carpathians

Yov Kniahynytskyi, born in Tysmenytsia, spent twelve years as a monk on Mount Athos before coming home to Galicia and years more looking for somewhere sufficiently far from everything. He settled here in 1606 with Ivan Vyshenskyi, the fiercest polemicist the Ukrainian church produced that century. The first cell went up in 1611, and the church that followed was consecrated on the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

What came next was fast. In 1620 the Patriarch of Constantinople granted the skete stauropegion — direct subordination to Constantinople, independent of the local hierarchy — and within eight years it presided over those 556 houses as prot, the governing monastery. Around 200 monks lived here at the peak, 50 of them hieromonks. There was a painting workshop, and a school of church part-singing whose reputation carried well beyond the mountains.

1676, and then 1785

Wealth made it a target. In 1676 a Turkish army marching against the Polish king turned aside to take the skete, and the walls and three towers were not enough: almost the whole brotherhood was killed and the library burned. The survivors rebuilt.

The end came from a quieter direction. Galicia passed to Austria with the partitions of Poland, and in 1785 Joseph II closed the monastery by decree. The wooden cathedral was carted off to Nadvirna, where it burned during the First World War. The great iconostasis — painted here between 1698 and 1705 by Yov Kondzelevych, the high point of Ukrainian icon painting — went to the parish church at Bohorodchany and, from 1924, to the National Museum in Lviv. It is still there. Do not come to Manyava expecting to see it.

The ruin stood for nearly two centuries. Restoration and archaeology ran through the 1970s and 80s, a museum opened in 1980, and on 28 May 1998 monks returned. The monastery belongs today to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

What to look for inside the walls

The rebuilt wooden cathedral of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross stands in the middle of the yard, cross-plan under small cupolas, raised at the end of the 20th century on the original footings. The older church of Saints Borys and Hlib is built into the south wall, with the Annunciation church nearby. Over the north gate the bell tower carries saints painted into its niches, and tradition credits the Korsun colonel Morozenko with paying for it. Among the relics, find the icon of the Mother of God known as the Abbess of Manyava and the grave slab of the first two abbots, Yov and Feodosii.

Two stories that will not go away

Hetman Ivan Vyhovskyi is said to lie buried somewhere on the grounds with his wife; the grave has never been found. The other tale gives the skete an underground passage to Pniv Castle, close to 30 km away across mountains — nobody believes it, and it is a fair measure of how large this place once loomed.

Visiting

The monastery is at 16 vul. Skytova, about 45 km from Ivano-Frankivsk, reached via Bohorodchany and Solotvyn. Without a car the nearest railway station is Nadvirna, 27 km off. Allow half a day rather than an hour: the Blessed Stone, the grotto the whole story starts from, is a kilometre away through the forest, and Manyava Falls is a separate walk from the far end of the village.

This is a working men's monastery — dress modestly, and women generally carry a headscarf. The paths beyond the walls are bare earth, steep in places and greasy after rain.