Qualla: Glinsk Hermitage

Glinsk Hermitage: Introduction

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Сіверян, CC BY-SA 3.0. The story begins, as the monks tell it, with beekeepers in a thicket of pines. Working the woods near Putivl sometime in the seventeenth century, they looked up and found an icon of the Nativity of the Theotokos resting high in a tall pine tree. Word spread, pilgrims came, and monks from a monastery in Putivl settled at the spot and founded a hermitage there in 1648. The thicket had long been dug for potters' clay, and so the place took an earthy nickname that stuck: the Glinsk Hermitage, from the Slavic word for clay. From a single icon in a tree grew one of the most revered spiritual centers of the Russian Orthodox world.

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Image: Сіверян | CC BY-SA 3.0

Glinsk Hermitage: Tsars, Elders, and a Wide Reputation

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Сіверян, CC BY-SA 3.0. The hermitage did not stay obscure for long. By the late seventeenth century its existence was confirmed by formal decrees, when Patriarch Joachim and the co-tsars Peter the Great and Ivan V affirmed the monks' right to live there. In 1764 it became fully independent, and its rul...

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Image: Сіверян | CC BY-SA 3.0

Glinsk Hermitage: Beets Instead of Bread

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Сіверян, CC BY-SA 3.0. The twentieth century fell hard on the hermitage. After the Russian Revolution, the new government moved to erase religion, and the local Soviet closed the monastery in September 1922. The Glinsk icon of the Nativity was carried to a nearby village and there vanished without a tr...

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Image: Сіверян | CC BY-SA 3.0

Glinsk Hermitage: A Return, and New Saints

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Сіверян, CC BY-SA 3.0. Only with the reforms of the late Soviet years and the collapse of the state that had tried to suppress it did the hermitage rise again. It reopened in 1994, and in 1996 regained its stavropegial standing, a special direct status within the church hierarchy. The most remarkable c...

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Image: Сіверян | CC BY-SA 3.0