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I ran across this website and thought th pictures were just so cool...

http://orangeukraine.squarespace.com/travel-pics/

Gordo

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Wonderful thanks!

I love this one, the moon over the Monastery of the Caves
http://cellar.org/iotd.php?threadid=2557

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Thanks Gordo and Pani Dobrodika Rose for sharing the pictures.

The one with the moon over the Lavra was my desktop for a long time a few years back.

The Lavra is one of the most amazing places to see.

-uc

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Dear Friends,

Yes, the Lavra contains the largest urban Choir of Saints anywhere in the world - over 200 all told. They keep finding more and two weeks ago, they found the bones of several others that they are now investigating as a portion of a wall caved in.

There are also 61 Myrrh-bearing Skulls of unknown Saints and the group of 12 Greek Saints that designed and built the Lavra.

There are also relics of other Saints, and they recently placed the relics of St Volodymyr the Metropolitan and New Hieromartyr and Protomartyr of the Soviet Yoke, shot by the Bolsheviks in 1918 on the Lavra grounds, in the Lavra Caves (he was the Archimandrite of the Lavra, after all) There are over 30+ canonized New Venerable Martyrs of the Kyivan Caves Lavra as well.

And the Old Believers actually commemorate a group of Kyivan Caves Fathers as martyrs of the Old Rite!

They also found the relics of St Peter Mohyla the Metropolitan, also Archimandrite and those of St Paul Koniuskevich of Tobolsk, who returned to the Lavra and stayed there until his death, having been tonsured there.

There are about another 50 missionary Saints, tonsured at the Lavra, but who worked and died elsewhere preaching the Gospel.

Many others were associated with the Lavra, such St Dmitri of Rostov and St Paissy Velichkovsky, who taught there.

There are also the Relics of four female saints buried with the Fathers of the Caves and are listed as "Fathers" wink :

St Theodora of Sihla, St Euphrosinia of Polotsk (most of their relics have been sent to their homelands of Romania and Belarus respectively), St Juliana Olshanska (died at 16), and St Dosithea, a woman who passed herself off as a man to get into the Lavra and who rose in the monastic ranks to become Archimandrite Dositheus - who also blessed ST Seraphim of Sarov to go to Sarov - her gender was discovered after her death.

St Seraphim of Sarov himself was tonsured a monk at the Kyivan Caves Lavra and is listed among its Saints!

In addition, another, earlier Caves monastery was found not too far away called the "Kyivan-Zverynetsky Caves" monastery destroyed by the Tatars/Mongols. They found shrines with relics of the Venerable Fathers in those Caves, long since forgotten about, but now reinstated into the calendar, together with a group of unknown Venerable Martyrs killed by the invaders - they also found remnants of prayer ropes, monastic scapulars, prayer books etc. This monastery existed PRIOR to the baptism of Kyivan Rus' by St Volodymyr!

Alex

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Talk about a history lesson. WOW!

UC I have thought of doing that many times, it is such an awesome site to gaze upon. It strikes me like the picture posted yesterday of the rainbow that formed over Auschwitz when the pope prayed.

I have always imagined going there, it must be awesome to walk in amongst so much holiness. Does it rub off? biggrin Second thought I should say 'rub in'. biggrin biggrin

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Dear Pani Rose,

One of those Saints, while still alive, was censing the tombs of the Venerable Fathers in the Caves on the day of Pascha one year.

As he went along the passage ways, he cried out in joy, "Holy and Venerable Fathers, Christ is Risen!"

To which the Fathers' noetic voices responded audibly, "Truly He is Risen!"

I always get goose pimples when I think of that story . . .

Alex


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