Optina Monastery near Kozelsk in Russia (8)

The Optina Hermitage (Russian: Оптина пустынь, Optina Pustyn) is an Eastern Orthodox monastery for men near Kozelsk in Russia. While much about the founding of this monastery is unknown and or not allowed public. The monastery is an extremely important spiritual center of the Orthodox Church…

Most of the monastery buildings were erected at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries…

Many famous saints are buried within its walls…

Important recent history: In 1987 with the beginning of Perestroika, Optina Pustyn was one of the first abbeys to be returned to the Russian Orthodox Church. Then in 1993 three members of the monastery were murdered on Easter night. They were hieromonk Vasily (Roslyakov), monk Ferapont (Pushkarev) and monk Trophim (Tatarinov), known collectively as the Optina martyrs…

(http://www.optina.ru/) For your reading of more information from the original site. The video was made by them, themselves…

Post by Kyle Keeton
Windows to Russia…

Addition: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozelsk) The much-venerated monastery, Optina Pustyn. In the 19th century, this hermitage gained wide renown for its “startsy”. After the outbreak of World War II, a POW camp was established in the monastery for Polish officers taken captive by the Red Army during the Polish Defensive War of 1939. Between April and May 1940, the NKVD transferred approximately 14,500 of them to a forest near Katyn, where they were executed in what became known as the Katyn massacre. The remaining two hundred officers were sent to a camp in Pavlishchev Bor and then to Gryazovets. The town was occupied by the German army from October 1941 until December 27, 1941 and was totally destroyed. It was rebuilt after the war.