Carl Montgomery

Kiev by night

Unlike the Buddhist monastery I visited in Myanmar (Burma), the caves monastery in Kiev has a stunning lack of jumping cats. Instead the Ukrainian Orthodox have and entirely different approach to worship. It’s here in 1051 before the church split that the monks worshiped in caves they dug themselves. When they died their bodies were placed in these caves and are still there in all their glory to this day. So today was an interesting day wandering through rather tight underground caves filled with a partly decomposed but still very much intact 1000 year old corpses. As with Burma, it was interesting to see the peoples religion in action. Ukrainian Orthodox decrees that you cross yourself three times, pray three times, touch the cask of the monk three times, kiss the glass case of the monk three times and you do this for every monk you come across. Thus the caves become a log jam of worship. Unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you feel about these things, i was not allowed to take pictures of said dead monks. Thus you will have to be content with the vista from above ground.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 4:01 am and is filed under Ill-advised06, Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.