About Pochaiv Lavra

The first documented record of the monastery at Pochaiv dates to 1527, although local tradition holds that it was founded three centuries earlier, during the Mongol invasion, by monks fleeing either the Kyiv Monastery of the Caves or Mount Athos. According to tradition, the Theotokos appeared to the monks as a column of fire, leaving her footprint in the rock on which she had stood; this imprint became venerated for the reputedly curative properties of the water issuing from it. In 1597, the noblewoman Anna Hojska donated land to the monastery along with a miracle-working icon of the Theotokos, said to have cured her brother’s blindness. Ivan Zalizo, an Orthodox monk who took the name Job, joined the monastery in 1604 and became one of its most consequential figures, establishing a printing press in 1630 that supplied theological literature across Galicia and Volhynia; he died on 25 October 1651 and was soon canonised as Job of Pochaiv. During the Zbarazh War in 1675, Ottoman-Cossack forces besieging the monastery reportedly fled upon witnessing an apparition of the Theotokos accompanied by angels and St. Job, an episode tradition credits with cementing Pochaiv’s reputation as a site of miraculous protection. The monastery’s ecclesiastical affiliation shifted repeatedly over the following centuries: it passed to Greek Catholic Basilian monks in 1720, was transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church by Tsar Nicholas I in 1831, and was granted the formal status of lavra in 1833. By the close of the 19th century, Pochaiv had become a major pilgrimage destination for Orthodox believers across the Russian Empire and the Balkans. The monastery remained open even under Soviet rule following the 1939 annexation of the region, an unusual exception among religious institutions of the period. In December 2023, Ukraine’s Supreme Court ruled to award spiritual control of the monastery to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, following years of jurisdictional disputes.