A Monastery That Changed Hands and Rank

From 1720 the Pochayiv monastery came under the control of the Greek Catholic Basilian order, an Eastern-rite church in communion with Rome, a jurisdiction it held for roughly a century amid the religiously divided landscape of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its successors. That arrangement ended abruptly in 1831, when Tsar Nicholas I, following the suppression of the Polish uprising of 1830 to 1831, had the monastery forcibly returned to Russian Orthodox jurisdiction and its Basilian monks expelled. Two years later the Holy Synod raised Pochayiv to the rank of Lavra, placing it alongside Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius and St. Alexander Nevsky Lavra as one of Eastern Orthodoxy's highest-ranked monastic communities, a rare case of a monastery's formal status rising in direct consequence of a jurisdictional seizure rather than through gradual growth.

Pochayiv's subsequent survival through the Soviet period, when the state closed the great majority of Ukraine's monasteries, sets it apart further still: sustained pressure on religious institutions throughout the twentieth century notwithstanding, the monastic community at Pochayiv was never fully shut down, one of only a small number of Ukrainian monasteries that can make that claim, and it entered the post-Soviet period as a functioning community rather than a building to be reconsecrated.