Kyiv Pechersk Lavra

The Primary Chronicle gives two dates for the founding of the monastery, 1051 and 1074, and does not reconcile them. The community itself begins with Anthony, a monk of Mount Athos who came originally from Liubech in the Principality of Chernigov and returned to Rus' to carry the monastic tradition to Kyivan Rus'. In 1051, in the reign of Yaroslav the Wise, he settled in an old cave in the hillside of Berestov Mount above the Dnipro, and a community of disciples soon grew around him; one of the first of them, Theodosius, is counted a co-founder. In 1058, with Anthony's blessing, Varlaam built a wooden church over the cave in honour of the Dormition of the Mother of God. Prince Iziaslav I of Kyiv, who lived from 1024 to 1078, ceded the whole mount to the Anthonite monks, and the monastery raised there was built by architects from Constantinople.

The cave Anthony first occupied was extended with corridors and a church of its own and is now known as the Far Caves; in 1057 he moved to a cave near the Upper Lavra, now called the Near Caves. In the eleventh century the monastery became a centre for the spread and establishment of Christianity in Kyivan Rus, and the chroniclers Nikon the Great and Nestor, author of the Tale of Bygone Years, worked there. The Kyiv Caves Patericon, compiled by the monastery's own monks in the thirteenth century, became popular reading across Eastern Europe and helped fix the symbolic image of Kyiv as a capital of Eastern Orthodoxy.

In 1096 the monastery was plundered by the Cumans, and it later fell victim to the Mongol invaders. In 1416 it was burned by the forces of the Golden Horde ruler Edigey during an attack on Kyiv, and it was not rebuilt until 1470. Through the period when Kyiv belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania it took the burials of the ruling families, among them Vladimir Olgerdovich, Prince of Kyiv, and his son Aleksandras Olelka; Uliana Olshanska, second wife of the Grand Duke Vytautas the Great, in 1448; the Lithuanian and Ruthenian Grand Duke Svitrigaila in 1452; and, near the Dormition Cathedral in 1530, the Lithuanian Grand Hetman Konstanty Ostrogski, who had commanded the Grand Ducal Lithuanian Army in its victory over the army of the Grand Principality of Moscow at Orsha in 1514. Mayors of Kyiv, members of the szlachta, Cossack starshyna and church hierarchs were buried there as well. In 1592 the monastery became a stauropegion of the Ecumenical Patriarchate at Constantinople, and in 1593 the archimandrite Nykyfor Tur ordered one of the first surveys of its immovable property, which recorded two towns and fifty-four villages.

In the seventeenth century, under the archimandrites Eliseus Pletenetsky, Zacharias Kopystensky and Petro Mohyla, the monastery stood at the heart of Ukrainian national identity. The printing house Pletenetsky established in the 1620s began the cultural revival of Kyiv, and its work was an early part of the development of printing in Ukraine. The school Mohyla founded at the monastery brought in the European educational currents of the day and led to a radical reform of education. Through the baroque era the Lavra flourished as a centre of arts and spirituality, and a pilgrimage to Kyiv was held by some to be preferable to a journey to Jerusalem. A legend published by the polemicist and preacher Joannicius Galiatovsky told that when a Polish army besieged the monastery in 1630 the Holy Mother of God protected the monks by turning a fiery rain against the invaders.

Patronage from figures as powerful as Ivan Mazepa and Raphael Zaborovsky did not hold off the change of authority. The annexation of the Metropolis of Kyiv by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1685 began the monastery's subjection to Russian imperial authority; its stauropegion passed from Constantinople to the Moscow patriarch in 1688, and to the Metropolitan of Kyiv in 1786. In 1722, by decree of Peter I of Russia, the Metropolis of Kyiv was reduced to an archbishopric, level with the other subdivisions of the Russian Synodal Church, and in the years that followed Russian religious tradition, values and language were imposed on the Orthodox Church in Ukraine.

The All Saints Church was raised between 1696 and 1698 as a specimen of Ukrainian baroque. On the night of 21 to 22 April 1718 the monastery burned: Orthodox monks working as tsarist agents set fire to the premises that held the library and the archive, with their unique documents and books from the Ukrainian past, and the record of the loss runs to all the buildings, the great church, the bells and the sacristy. The Gate Church of the Trinity, which sits above the Holy Gates at the entrance on the site of an older stone church, was rebuilt after the fire. The Great Lavra Belltower, designed by the architect Johann Gottfried Schädel and begun in 1731, rises 96.5 metres above 374 steps and was the tallest free-standing belltower at the time of its construction.

By the eighteenth century the Lavra was the largest church landholder in Ukraine, its holdings running to three towns, seven small towns and about two hundred villages and hamlets, more than 70,000 serfs, eleven brickworks and six glassworks, more than 160 distilleries and windmills, some two hundred taverns and two horse factories. Many smaller monasteries and the hermitages known as pustyni, among them Kytaivska and Mykilska near Kyiv, were subordinated to it together with their lands and their serfs in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. The monastery was a centre of chronicle-writing, and works by foreign authors were translated into Church Slavonic and copied there.

Under Russian rule the Lavra drew mass pilgrimage from common people and from figures of authority, the royal family among them, and the guides for pilgrims printed in numbers in Tsarist Russia in the late nineteenth century drew it further into the empire's symbolic space. A stone fortress wall was put up around the Lower Lavra when the Pechersk Fortress was reconstructed in the middle of the century, and near its end a refectory chamber and church were built to the design of the architect V. Nikolaiev, replacing a baroque predecessor of the Cossack Hetmanate that the Russian authorities had taken apart. In 1849 the monastery built a two-storey hospital at the Mykilskyi monastery along with a hospital for pilgrims and travellers that treated more than five hundred sick people a year. Among those buried at the Lavra under Russian rule were Natalia Dolgorukova and Pyotr Rumyantsev; Vasily Kochubey and Ivan Iskra, who had denounced Hetman Ivan Mazepa, were laid near the Refectory Church in 1708, and Pyotr Stolypin was buried in the same place in 1911.

The years after 1917 brought the wholesale destruction of the Orthodox clergy and of everything attached to the Church, and attempts to Ukrainise the Lavra during the revolution of the early twentieth century failed in the political instability. On 25 January 1918 Volodymyr, Metropolitan of Kyiv and Halych, was tortured and murdered within the monastery walls by Bolshevik troops. The Lavra was closed in 1920 and its community disbanded; a preserve was established on the site in 1922 and a museum opened on its territory in 1926. On 4 August 1929 the Bolsheviks declared complete the conversion of the former monastery into the All-Ukrainian Museum Town, whose stated purpose was to serve as a centre of anti-religious propaganda in Soviet Ukraine, and a petition was laid before the republic's People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs for the immediate eviction of the clergy who had until then lived on the grounds. Through the Soviet decades the bodies of the saints lying in the caves were left uncovered, the regime having no regard for religion; they were covered with cloth after the Soviet Union fell and remain in that state.

Religious services resumed under the German occupation. On 3 November 1941, a couple of months after German troops took Kyiv, the Dormition Cathedral, the eleventh-century main church of the monastery, was blown up. Soviet forces destroyed it: the withdrawing troops practised scorched earth and blew up every Kyiv bridge over the Dnieper and the main street of Khreshchatyk along with the Lavra itself, and St Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery nearby had been blown up in the 1930s in the same pattern of Soviet disregard for cultural heritage. The act was afterwards told two ways, both of them Soviet. A post-war cover story, spread for a long time by the propaganda organs and carried by the Soviet press, falsely laid the demolition on the German occupation authorities under Reichskommissar Erich Koch, arguing from a Nazi doctrine that subject peoples should not keep symbolic places of worship. Later Soviet accounts instead credited the destruction of the cathedral, and the mining and blowing up of the centre of Kyiv, to an NKVD sabotage and terror group led by Ivan Kudria.

The cathedral was left in ruins as evidence of Nazi crimes, and the clearing of the rubble went on into the 1960s; a plan to rebuild it in its original medieval form in time for the millennium of the Christianisation of Rus was never carried out. From the end of the Second World War the monastery worked again as part of the Russian Orthodox Church, with more than a hundred monks living on its premises, until the authorities closed it once more in 1961.

Activity was renewed in 1988 as part of the celebrations for the thousandth anniversary of the Christianisation of Kyivan Rus. In June that year, at the petition of the exarch, Metropolitan Filaret (Denysenko), and under a resolution of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR, the territory of the Far Caves was handed to a newly created monastic community, with Filaret as its first superior and archimandrite Ionafan (Yeletskykh) as vicegerent. In 1990 the Lavra was inscribed, together with Saint Sophia Cathedral, on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Ownership passed in 1992 to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) with the backing of Kyiv's political leadership, and Metropolitan Volodymyr (Sabodan) held the superiorship from that year; in 1994 a resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers gave the church the use of the Far Caves complex. On 9 December 1995 President Leonid Kuchma decreed the restoration of the Dormition Cathedral. The work was done in roughly two years, hurried so as to be ready for the Lavra's 950th anniversary, without serious scholarly preparation and in modern materials, and the rebuilt cathedral was consecrated and solemnly reopened on 24 August 2000. The site was granted national historic-cultural preserve status on 13 March 1996 and was named one of the Seven Wonders of Ukraine on 21 August 2007. The property passed into church hands piece by piece: Kyiv City Council agreed on 29 April 2004 to give the Moscow Patriarchate monastery the free use of eighteen buildings and premises, and on 11 July 2013 the Azarov government granted the free use of a further seventy-nine buildings and structures, including the labyrinths of the Near and Far Caves, putting more than half of the Lavra's area in the church's hands. Its management drew scandal over expensive cars and other trappings of wealth, over monks' connections to the Russian FSB, over the veneration of Tsar Nicholas II and over the spread of anti-Ukrainian propaganda. The monastery closed for quarantine on 13 April 2020 with more than ninety confirmed coronavirus cases on its premises, three of which later ended in death, and reopened on 25 May. On 22 November 2022 searches at the Lavra seized money and documents, turned up propaganda literature and Russian state papers, and found Russian citizens and stateless persons sheltering in its buildings.

Until the end of 2022 jurisdiction was divided between the state museum, the National Kyiv-Pechersk Historic-Cultural Preserve, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), whose chief monastery this was and whose leader, Onufriy, Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine, kept his residence here. The agreement of 17 June 2016 that gave that church free part-time use of the Dormition Cathedral and the Refectory Church for services ended at the turn of the year, recorded as having lapsed on 31 December 2022 by one account and as terminated by the government in January 2023 by another; the two churches passed to direct state control, and the church challenged the termination in court. On 7 January 2023, Orthodox Christmas by the old calendar, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine was permitted to celebrate in the Dormition Cathedral, and Metropolitan Epiphanius of Kyiv led the service at nine that morning. From that month the Orthodox Church of Ukraine has held regular services in the churches of the Upper Lavra and has kept a monastic community of its own there; on 16 August 2024 it celebrated the liturgy for the first time in the Church of the Life-Giving Spring in the Lower Lavra. On 10 March 2023 the preserve announced that the 2013 agreement would be terminated, on the grounds that the church had breached it by making alterations to the historic site and on other technical infractions, and ordered it off the territory by 29 March; the church answered that there were no legal grounds for the eviction and called it "a whim of officials from the Ministry of Culture", while Dmitry Peskov, press secretary to the Russian president, said on 17 March that the refusal to extend the lease "confirms the correctness" of the invasion Russia had begun on 24 February 2022. Ukraine terminated the lease on 29 March 2023, ending an arrangement under which the church had housed its governing bodies, its academy and seminary and the leadership of the Kyiv eparchy on the site since 27 October 1990; the church did not fully leave. On 16 April 2023 the Easter liturgy of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, led by the acting vicegerent archimandrite Avraamii, carried prayer in Ukrainian in the Dormition Cathedral for the first time in three hundred years, and on 23 July 2025 Metropolitan Epiphanius held a service in Ukrainian in the Far Caves, the first of its kind in many years. Access to the Lower Lavra was temporarily suspended for all visitors except priests, monks and the monastery's workers from 11 August 2023.

The Lavra belongs to the state, and religious organisations use it on lease terms; the National Kyiv-Pechersk Historic-Cultural Preserve on the Upper Lavra was given national status in 1996 and holds 144 structures, 122 of them monuments of history and culture. In September 2023 UNESCO placed the site on the List of World Heritage in Danger. On the night of 24 January 2026 a Russian drone attack shattered windows and damaged two buildings, the entrance to the Far Caves complex and the Church of the Conception of St Anne, the first war-related damage the complex had taken since the Second World War. A second strike, dated 14 June 2026 in some accounts and 15 June in others, hit the Dormition Cathedral with Geran-2 kamikaze drones, the Russian counterpart of the Iranian Shahed type: a large part of the roof was destroyed, the main dome and cupola damaged, the Ioann Kushchnyk tower brought down and a fire of some 800 square metres burned on the cathedral roof. It was the first time the cathedral had been targeted in an armed conflict since the Second World War. Russia denied responsibility and blamed a United States-made Patriot air-defence missile, offering no evidence for the claim and no account of why the remains of two Russian-made Shahed-type drones were recovered at the site. President Volodymyr Zelensky, who visited the site that day and inspected the damage, called the attack "one of Russia's most serious crimes against Christian culture to date".