Urals monastery offers boxing lessons, puts on plays

Dating back to 1704, the Saint Cosmas hermitage in Kostyleva provides social services in a place where poverty reigns. It also operates a shop that makes pine cone jam. For a local atheist, Sergey, at the beginning "they seemed like fanatics, then I realised that they are more normal than others."

Moscow (AsiaNews) – For residents of Kostyleva, a remote hamlet in the Urals, the Saint Cosma Orthodox hermitage has become the only source of entertainment and socialisation, thanks to a club called Za drugi svoja, "For friends" or “For one’s neighbours” in Russian, which was set up by the local monks.

The activities, which include boxing, strike ball, plays and an arts workshop, are held at the monastery’s catechetical centre and in the school gyms of the neighbouring villages of Ust-Salda and Kordyukovo. The nearest town, Verkhoturye, is 30 kilometres away, whilst the regional capital Yekaterinburg is almost 500 kilometres away.

The hermitage dates back to 1704, when the miraculous relics of the Blessed Simeon were moved from the village of Merkushino, a hamlet of Verkhoturye. According to legend, jurodivyj Kosma, who was "mad for Christ", jumped for a few days on crutches around the relics in a procession, asking Brother Simeon “Let's take a break". Wherever he took a break in local villages a chapel was built. In 2007, the Saint Cosma Monastery was opened next to one of these.

A group of monks came from Yekaterinburg to dedicate themselves to the life of a hermit in accordance with the rigorous rule of Mount Athos, which provides for uninterrupted liturgy, continuous exercises of asceticism and complete renunciation of all that is worldly. Things though went differently.

Hegumen (abbot) Petr Mazhetov spoke to a Rossiiskaja Gazeta correspondent about his fellow monks who, arriving in the village, realised that it had only one street, no shops for local residents, all 120 of them, and only one attraction: the barren prairie up to the Tura river. Locals embraced the monks.

At the monastery, two plays are performed each year: one marking Victory called ‘Two Sisters’, namely victory and poverty. The other is titled ‘Amalgam’, a philosophical tale with elements of fantasy. The Hegumen is the director.

The latter story pits the 20th Century against a hypothetical future, in which no one gets sick or suffers, everyone lives very long, but no one has the ability to procreate. All are protected by a proto-immune sphere, called "amalgam", until a young woman decides to do without it in order to enjoy dying a “mother’s death”.

For Fr Petr, the play is meant to creatively instill hope in the small local population, almost abandoned by the wider society, imparting healthy Christian Orthodox principles of love for life and the family.

The monastery goes beyond plays. It helps adults, for whom it has opened a small shop to produce local herbal teas, Ivan-Chai, and pine cone jam according to a unique recipe.

Club members and shop employees neither smoke nor drink, and many of them go to confession every week and talk about the Sunday liturgy. Some workers and even some businessmen, fascinated by the successes of the Kostyleva community, have moved here from other villages, even from as far as Yekaterinburg.

The monastery offers a whole range of social services, and even local non-believers have come to share life, work and fun with religious believers. One atheist worker, Sergey, said that at the beginning "they seemed like fanatics, then I realised that they are more normal than others."

• russia
• yekaterinburg
• kostyleva
• saint cosma monastery
• hermitage