Maniava Blessed Stone

It was a long, long time ago, it seems, when Halych was still called the capital of Prince Danylo. So, two monks from the Kyiv Cave Monastery were sent out into the world for some kind of punishment. They walked from village to village, city to city, and after six months of traveling they came to the Carpathian Mountains. One monk was carrying a golden cross, and the other monk was carrying a bottle of water from the spring of the Pechersk Lavra and some weight. Their goal was to weigh the water of different neighborhoods wherever they went, and if the water was equal to the weight of the Pechersk spring, they were to found a hermitage there. Traveling like this, they found Bystrytsia near Solotvina and decided to rest after a long journey. They prayed to God, ate wild vegetables, which were plentiful in these forests, and then began to prepare for the long journey. But as soon as they descended from the bank of the Bystrytsia River to weigh the water, they met a young fisherman sitting above the bank, fishing with a net... The fisherman, seeing the monks, greeted them very politely, and when he learned3 where they came from and why they came to these lands, he asked them to invite them to his cave. In reality, he was not an ordinary fisherman, but a devil, who was said to have been sent to this world by Lucifer to drive out those monks from this place so that they would not draw water from the Bystrytsia and build a hermitage there. The monks did not suspect any treachery, they were persuaded, and when they entered the fisherman's cave, the yew door of the cave slammed shut with a great bang. The monks were terrified, for they recognized from the arrangements in the cave that it was a trick of the evil spirit - there was nothing but a table, or rather a stump that was used as a table in the cave. Now they calmed down, waiting for the end - what would happen. The fisherman asked them to sit down near this stump, and he took out a large mason jar with wine and a glass from a nook and began to serve them. The monks had not yet assumed treachery and let him talk. They poured wine into the cups, and when they started drinking, they crossed the wine. The fisherman was outraged and asked them not to do so. When the monks heard this, they realized that they were in the company of an evil spirit. So they did not drink, but asked him to let them out of the cave. The fisherman laughed and said, "I will let you out only if you sign a contract to leave this country and go back to where you came from!" At these words, a great noise was made and many devils appeared.

So the monks were in a great difficulty. A monk who had a golden cross put it to the door, which was now open. He came out of the cave. The second monk, who had water, saw the devils near him and began to sprinkle holy water on them, moving further and further forward. When the devils saw the hovering over them, they began to dig a hole and run away, until they came to the place that is now called Manyava, and the monk followed them. After praying to God, he sat down, exhausted, under a forest bush to rest. And you should know that there were no villages here at that time, only dense forests in which all kinds of animals multiplied freely. So it took a while for the two monks to be found, because one of them stayed at the log door, and the other went very far away in a burrow. So they wandered through the forests for a month, not knowing each other.

After a month it happened that a traveler, passing through, met the first monk at the log door, and he told him his terrible story about the fisherman and complained that he had executed his brother monk... The traveler stayed with him for one night, and on the next day he went on his way, where after a while he met the second monk, who told him his adventure with the devils. The traveler told him about the meeting with the first monk, and in this way both monks weighed the water again, and it was exactly equal to the weight of the water from the spring of the Pechersk Lavra. So, they were destined to settle here. They chose a suitable place for the monastery. They wrote to Kyiv and got help to build the skete.

But while the skete was being built, these monks stayed under the Blessed Stone. It served as their monastic cell and chapel. It once looked different, not like we see it today. The monks did not sit still for a single minute, they worked every day around the Blessed Stone. They cleared the blackthorn bushes for a favorable attack, made a garden door, and in front of the cave they started a beautiful vegetable garden where they planted spring wheat and sowed grain. The monks lived in this cave for many years.

The Blessed Stone rises almost a kilometer from the bridge on the Manyavka River. To get to it, you need to walk along a forest road that runs next to the Skyt, the monastery lake, and then along a mountain valley to the southeast to a covered wooden bridge, from where it is 300 meters to the Blessed Stone. After crossing the bridge, we climb up a steep slope along a path and turn right in the middle of the mountain.

The stone - a block with a grotto - resembles a giant Gorgan with an opening similar to the mouth of a frozen dinosaur. This grotto is the ancient dwelling of the monks - a hermitage. Its dimensions are 10x3 meters. Water has been flowing out of this boulder for centuries. Ivan Vahylevych, Yakiv Holovatskyi, Antin Mohylnytskyi, and others wrote about the stone and the spring. Many legends and traditions are recorded from the people.

Leonid Matskevyi presented interesting information about the Blessed Stone in a report at a conference dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Julian Tselevych's birth in 1993: "In 1977-1979, the Carpathian Archaeological Expedition of the Institute of Social Sciences of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine conducted research on the territory of the Maniavsky Skete in parallel with restoration work. Particular attention was paid to the Blessed Stone Grotto, near which, during reconnaissance surveys, stone products dating back to the Mesolithic period (the Stone Age, 8,000 years before the birth of Christ) were found."

Julian Tselevych in his poem "The Temptation and Fornication of the Monks" reports that it was in this grotto, in a cave, that the monks "found a good refuge." It is possible that in pagan times it was a temple. Ivan Vahylevych suggests that the first monks settled here in 1281. Later Ivan Franko would call them "the first apostles of the Carpathian Pidhiria."

In his 1994 book Sketches of the History of the Maniavsky Monastery, he includes a Galician legend about the Blessed Stone. It was written down by the Galician writer Sylvester Kalynets.