Kostomarovskiy Spasskiy Monastyr'

It is likely that Ukrainian monks founded a monastery here in the seventeenth century, though some say it is significantly older. The form of the church is a natural chalk outcrop, excavated to provide two volumes, with a covered bell tower spanning the two. Spassky Cave Church, Kostomarovo, Voronezh, Russia, 1600s Publication date 25 Sep 2019 Publisher Phaidon Press Ltd

Unusual place

The Spassky Convent is located two kilometers from the right bank of the Don River near the village of Kostomarovo, Podgorensky District, Voronezh Region. The main attraction of the monastery is the unique cave temples located in the thickness of the chalk mountain. No written evidence has survived about the time of their creation. There are only hypotheses, assumptions and oral traditions, the reliability of which is rather difficult to determine. No written evidence has survived about the time of the creation of the Kostomarovsky cave temples. There are only hypotheses, assumptions, oral traditions and memories of old-timers, the reliability of which is rather difficult to determine. There is a general consensus that they were created in several stages. At the end of the 19th century, archaeologist and local historian D.M. Strukov, based on a number of features, which primarily include the features of ancient church architecture, put forward a hypothesis about the emergence of cave temple structures on the Don in the first centuries of Christianity. Following this hypothesis, it is impossible not to notice the striking similarity of the Don underground monasteries with the ancient cave structures of Cappadocia. Even the natural landscape of the Kostomarovskaya monastery in places is surprisingly similar to this bizarre rocky area in Asia Minor. Christians who fled from the bloody persecutions of the Roman emperors settled on this land already in the 1st century after the Nativity of Christ. In the thickness of the numerous mountains, they created dwellings, temples and monasteries. Several thousand cave churches carved into the rocks and several dozen underground cities have survived to this day, which, in the event of an enemy attack, reliably sheltered their inhabitants. Obviously, the Don cave temples served the same purposes, sheltering the ancient ascetics both from the summer heat and from the numerous raids of nomadic tribes. But the most important thing for their creators was that the cave was that quiet and silent depths, which was ideally suited for deep attentive prayer, where an uninterrupted mind completely rushed to God. In terms of their internal structure, principle of construction and functional use, the Donskoy cave monasteries almost exactly repeat the ancient underground structures of Cappadocia. The main place in them is occupied by the temple, there are also monastic cells and tombs for the burial of the deceased. These facts allow speaking with a high degree of reliability not only about a single Christian tradition of cave architecture, but also about the belonging of the creators of cave monasteries to a single historical period. This assumption is not contradicted by the hypothesis that the creation of underground churches on the Don was a consequence of the spread of the iconoclastic heresy of the 8th-10th centuries, when icon-worshipers, among whom were many monks, fled from persecution from the Byzantine Empire to Syria, Palestine, the Caucasus and Crimea ... Some of them passed through the Black and Azov seas along the Don to our region, where cave temples were created in the thickness of the chalk rocks. The probability of these two hypotheses can be evidenced by the fact that even before the new era, the Don was a mighty full-flowing artery connecting the northeastern tribes with the Greek colonies, in particular with Heraclea of ​​Pontus, as evidenced by numerous archaeological finds. Thus, both the persecuted first Christians and the Byzantine monks who fled from the iconoclasts could go to the Middle Don by a path well known to the ancient world, spreading and strengthening the Christian faith in these parts. The famous Russian church historian and theologian AV Kartashov in his book "Essays on the History of the Russian Church" says that in the 7th-8th centuries. on the territory of the Khazar Khanate in the Russian part of the population of Khazaria, envoys from Byzantium actively preached Christianity. The result of this sermon was the creation of an Orthodox Christian diocese within the kaganate with its own bishop. The territory of the Middle Don, where the Kostomarovskaya cave monastery is located, was part of the ancient Khazar Khanate. This fact can serve as an indirect confirmation of the likelihood of the creation of cave temples of the Don region in the period from the 7th to the 10th centuries. like monks-

You don't often see cave temples.

Nice, I have been there even when there were only caves, I saw how it was being built. His wife and son were baptized there. It's funny to listen to stories about the "execution" icon and Golgotha