Non -Life monastery

Exactly five years ago, on the morning of May 1, 2016, when a festive Easter service was going on in the Main Cathedral of the Valaam Monastery, a fire began at the Winter Hotel. As a result, the architectural monument, allegedly protected by the state, and part -time - a residential building of local residents, burned down two -thirds. None of those who lived in Zimka returned to her anymore. So the triumphant process of eviction from the island of the local population, begun by the Valaam Monastery in the late 2000s, ended.

With manic persistence, consistently and sometimes cruelly and lawlessly, the monastery survived from Valaam those who at least neutral, but for the most part, with understanding, reacted to his return to the island in the late 1980s, exactly 50 years after the evacuation of monks to Finland during the Winter War (at that time, the Lears' areas, including Valaam The archipelago belonged to Finland, and the monastery was evacuated along with 400 thousand inhabitants of neighboring areas).

And so the monks returned and began to actively justify on the island. Those local residents, who in the 2000s did not agree to leave the island voluntarily in the houses built in the stronghold (with state money) on the mainland, was forced to be forcibly.

At first, cases of eviction were single - a family of Muskevichs was evicted from the Voskresensky monastery. By the mid-2010s, the flywheel of monastic repressions spun in full force, and they began to deprive people of their apartments and evicted through the court lists. The leadership of the monastery did not disdain either frank lies or for a fake of documents, sometimes openly stating that one or another "secular" was ordered to throw off the island with his family, because "it is being narrowed everywhere." The local authorities and the regional authorities of Karelia were dancing under the tune of the monastery. The police and the prosecutor’s office, courts and even the presidential administration played along with him. And the president himself signed one after another instructions to allocate more and more millions of rubles to the monastery. These millions, more precisely, billions , Bishop Pankrati, the abbot of the monastery did not want to share with anyone.

The case of the fire reached the trial only two years later. There was a hope that during the proceedings it turns out the whole truth about who and how set fire to the "winter". But at the first meeting, representatives of the monastery proposed the accused, local resident Dmitry Sinitsa, worldwide, and he agreed (in the event of a conviction, he was threatened with a real term of imprisonment). So the monastery "forgave" a title " arson " of an architectural monument, supposedly protected by the state. So the story of the secular Valaam ended. So the secular court finally legitimized the crimes committed by the monastery. Thus, the monastery stood the right to dispose of the right to dispose of exclusively in his own interests by state billions and hundreds of millions of rubles, which he earns on serving tourists and pilgrims.

I am completely sure that in my desire to undividedly rule the island of the abbot of the monastery and his entourage only covered with high ideas about the "Holy Land" and "Northern Athos". In fact, monastery chiefs moved self -interest and money -grubbing. All their commercial activity - from the construction of hotels to the sale of alcohol, from the organization of excursions to production "under the brand of the monastery" of food - is not a spiritual enrichment. It is clear to any Orthodox that the current monastery is as far from the ideals of monasticism as Russian prisons - from human rights.

However, there is not only nothing surprising in this, but nothing new. “Everything is for convenience, and nothing for the soul,” the Russian writer Vasily Nemirovich-Danchenko in the book “The Peasant Abode”, which was reborn more than a century ago, showed this, because it was already obvious that “the stables have grown out the monastery and crushed it.” The current "stables" crushed the "monastery" finally, and, most likely, irrevocably.

Gleb Yarova - political scientist

The "Opinion" expressed in the heading of the point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial office