The story of a war crime
Last Wednesday, August 7, 2024, Ukrainian forces launched an incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, as everyone knows by now. But few have seen the details of what this looked like for the local people. Here is what happened in an ancient Russian monastery near the Ukrainian border.
Just a half kilometer from the city of Sumy on the Ukrainian border is the St. Nicholas-Gornalsky Belogorsk (White Hill) Monastery, not far from the town of Sudzha. One of the most treasured holy sites of the Kursk lands, it was founded in 1671—about 350 years ago.
After the Mongol Tatars razed the Ostrogozh Divnogorsk (Wondrous Hill) monastery in the Voronezh region during the thirteenth century, Elder Nektary and the two monks Theodosy and Lavrenty moved to the site of the future Gornalsky Monastery, bringing with them an icon of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker. Soon the monastery received church utensils, vestments, books, lands, and a mill on the Psel River.
Monk Theodosius became the first abbot. The small brotherhood built a wooden church on earnings they received from selling lime out of local deposits, and dedicated it to the Transfiguration of the Lord. One of its main icons was the Pryazhevskaya icon of the Mother of God.
By 1733 the monastery was had fallen into disrepair—the bell tower had collapsed, and it was too dangerous to serve in the Transfiguration Church. Thus the wooden church was disassembled, and what was left of it was used to build a chapel in the monastery cemetery, where the old iconostasis was then installed. Soon the large brick Church of the Transfiguration was built, as well as a new bell tower and a monastery wall. During the reign of Catherine the Great, many monasteries were closed. This is a complicated story, but it could be said that if the monasteries were not self-sufficient, they were deemed a burden on the state, and so they were simply closed and their churches used as parishes. The Gornalsky Monastery was temporarily spared because it was able to support itself by selling lime, bricks, and beeswax, but was nevertheless closed in 1788. All the other monastery structures, including the St. Nicholas Church, were disassembled and the bricks used elsewhere.
But miracles happened there after the monastery was closed. In the Transfiguration Church, candles would light themselves before the icons. Such occurrences continued until the Prazhevskaya icon was discovered in 1792.
One day, merchant Kosma Kuprev from Sudzha who had fallen ill, came to pray before this miracle-working icon and received healing. Out of gratitude to God, he decided to rebuild the monastery using his own means. He himself became one of first monks in the restored monastery—the others were his sons Feodor and Vladimir.
Later, churches dedicated to St. Nicholas, to the Protection of the Mother of God, and again to the Transfiguration of the Lord were built.
In 1878, the great Russian writer Feodor Dostoevsky visited the monastery, and immortalized his talks with the monks in the novel, Brothers Karamazov.
In 1922, the monastery was closed by the communist regime, but the monks remained there, hiding in the chalk caves and guarding the Prazhev icon of the Mother of God. However in 1937 the monastery was completely closed that the monks exiled. The monastery buildings were used to house a juvenile detention center and later a boarding school for orphans. In 1996 the monastery was returned to the Russian Orthodox Church, and its first Liturgy was served on St. Nicholas’s day, December 19, 2001.
Since then, the brothers have labored hard to restore the churches, living quarters, and trapeza that had fallen into terrible disrepair. Up till the recent destruction, it has been a place of pilgrimage from people from Belgorod, Stary Oskol, Voronezh, Lipetsk, and Moscow. Before the Maidan revolution, many pilgrims would come from Ukraine—which is, as we mentioned, only a half kilometer away. From the monastery hill you can even see the domes of the church in Sumy across the border.1
So why were Ukrainian soldiers given orders to destroy the St. Nicholas-Gornalsky Monastery? Of course we don’t know what their commanders had in their heads, but the spiritual reality is that monks are warriors of Christ, fighting their way through the hordes of demons, spirits of the air. A monastery is a spiritual fortress of Orthodoxy, and Orthodoxy is the stronghold of Russian culture and history. The St. Nicholas Monastery and its wonder-working icon of the Mother of God are also a symbol—and not just a symbol—of Russian-Ukrainian unity in Christ and His Orthodox Church.
On that fateful day last week, the St. Nicholas Monastery became Ground Zero.
Photo: Telegram
It was morning, and the monks were serving the Liturgy. Right in the middle of the service, just before the singing of the Creed, soldiers of the Ukrainian army, rode a tank to the Russian monastery and started shelling the churches. (We say “soldiers of the Ukrainian army”, and not “Ukrainian soldiers”, because in fact there are a large number of foreign “mercenaries” participating in the incursion.) According to Church canons, Divine Liturgy cannot be interrupted. The monks had to complete the service regardless of the shells flying at them, even if it meant their death. So they prayed like the first Christians in the catacombs as the tanks kept shelling the church.
And the Lord protected them. After the completion of the Liturgy, in a brief pause in the shelling they ran to the basement. Like diabolical spirits of the air, drones began systematically destroying the monastery. Two churches were burned down, deliberately and precisely. The monks, elderly assistants, and laborers waited until evening to emerge from cover.
Once the shelling stopped, they rushed to the car and headed towards Sudzha. But the monastery was surrounded. The area was taken under control by the Ukrainian military, who were shooting at civilian vehicles. Many managed to break through, but one monastery laborer named Sergey was killed He used to wash dishes in the monastery and help in the trapeza. Like many other innocents who have been killed since the Maidan revolution and subsequent war, he is a new martyr.
Before the partition of the Soviet Union, the Kursk region and the Sumy region were family. No one regarded the border between the Ukrainian SSR and the Russian SSR as a dividing line. Later, in the 2000s, processions with the Pryazhevskaya icon went from the Kursk monastery to the Sumy region. Several thousand Russian people participated—from both sides. This procession united Holy Rus’.
A special bridge was even built over the river to carry the icon of the Mother of God. In 2014, it was blown up by Ukraine’s Right Sector. But it didn’t matter. People from Sumy stood on one bank of the river, and people from Kursk on the other. They bowed to each other and prayed together. After February 2022, the icon was processed near the Russian border—no one from Sumy came for the procession.
Photo: Telegram
But last week, men came from Sumy—in tanks. Perhaps their mothers, grandmothers, or aunts had participated in those processions in former times of peace and unity. Perhaps even some of these soldiers themselves had participated.
Those fleeing monastery headed toward Sudzha, where a priest hid them in the Holy Trinity Church. How this harks back to the time of the Mongol Tatars invasioins—Christian families, monastics, clergy, taking shelter in Orthodox churches, to escape that horrible component of so many barbaric wars—rape and slaughter of innocent people.
So it was in Sudzha. A priest was hiding people in the Trinity Church from shelling. It’s the same as it was in bygone days. Russians have always taken cover from war in churches.
Stories from people in this border region are now seeping through the Russian information space—scenes reminiscent of other terrible times of attacks by seeming minions of hell, only this time with all the attributes of modern warfare…2
Here a eye-witness account related by one of the monastery brothers who stood through the Liturgy till the end, then managed to escape death by drone:
“It was about two days ago, yes, about eight in the morning, they started firing at us. The Liturgy was in process. Apparently it was a tank, aimed directly at us. The Liturgy was going on—you can’t abandon the Liturgy, it is forbidden to stop the Liturgy, we were just singing the Creed, the whole rest of the Liturgy was ahead, but we couldn’t stop. They hit us and hit us, directly aimed at us, at our church. Before us stood a new, just recently built church. It hadn’t even been consecrated yet. Because of these events, it was not realistic to consecrate it. How could we call young people there, well, the monastery is 500 meters from the border. And the Ukrainian forces’ positions were, well, only three kilometers away, even less in places. They first burned down the new church, and then they finished destroying this church, where we served. Of course, we completed the service, but it was very hard to serve under those conditions. You understand, you can’t hide anywhere, not in the doorway, nowhere. The priest stands before the holy table and has to serve. There were no parishioners there. We haven’t had pilgrims for a long time—war is going on there. It’s not the first time, shells have flown at the monastery before. And one man died, he lived on the monastery territory. A layman died just three weeks ago.
Fr. Meletiy. Photo: Telegram Screenshot
So in the church was the serving priest, I myself, and one man who sang. We were able to complete the service. We have exits in the church on the right and left, in the adjoining wings. We gathered, and I understood that they were not firing every second. They would fire, and then make corrections, then fire a second time. You have about a minute. I said, “Let’s run in this minute.” So they fired a second time and we ran to the basement. As soon as we had run away, a missile struck right into my cell, destroying it completely. It flew into the window. Doors were flying all over the place. When they had already begun occupying everything, we had literally had already just passed over. We sat in the basement till 10:30. The tank stopped firing, and then the drones began—now little-by-little, purposefully, and precisely. Drones, bombers, burning equipment. They understood that we were hiding. They started firing at the windows.
So we discussed it, and decided to break out. We agreed on three-four. The forecast was for rain, but the rain didn’t come. On three-four we quickly ran out. We had decided to which car. We drove out, and “Baba Yaga” [a drone] was lying in front of the monastery. We drove around the drone, and off we flew. We drove as far as we could, so that the drone would not catch up to us. They had calculated where we were heading, and waited for us at Kurilovka. In Kurilovka people started leaving their houses. The people said, “Please, we beg you, don’t go!” They shot a car there yesterday.” I asked, “How is it that they shot it? From where?” “Right from the pig farm, at Lesovaya.” The shot them directly, with firearms.
