Monastery of St. Basil of Ostroh

Over the water-filled valley and its meandering river, wreathed with wreaths of mountain streams and green willows, flowering meadows and orchards, native vineyards and cereals, in the heights of the mountain Ostrog, in Montenegro, as it emerged from the depths of ancient rock, Ostroška holy shone, Introductions to the Holy Mother of God. Surrounding the sanctuary, beneath the sky, protective and directional, a raft of boulders, a refuge of birds and winds, silently opening her golden bosoms, as if she were wrapping them in their thick, stone folds and curtains of greenery, rising steep trees, bushes and trees. and creepers, they end in the silence of the monastery terraces, clung to the cliff.

The mountain road, a narrow and winding sleeve of the modern Podgorica-Niksic highway, which branches off from Bogetici, takes you to them. Ascending over the rocky mountain pass of Povija, with the border belt between the angry swells of the rolling hills and the native plain of Bjelopavlić, he ascends the sides of Ostroški Kuk almost to the very top of Ostroška greda.

By winding the steep slopes, it first leads you to the so-called Lower Shrine and its Temple of the Most Holy Trinity, on a spacious and flattened high vista with landings, a fringed spear-iron fence towards a vertical slope and ends with a well against the natural wall of rocks. It takes no more than half an hour of hiking or ten minutes by car to climb to the uppermost plateau, stretching just above the tops of the wooded rocky slopes, along the steep boulders of the sharp, sharp ridge, when climbing steeper slopes. Starting from the last road bend, extended for centuries by the human hand, it further grows into a fenced and relatively spacious port and at its end narrows into a staircase in front of the stone gates of the Holy Cross with crosses. Becoming then narrower behind the gates, it finally turns into a light stone terrace, divided by a two-lane gender, and walled with an arched wall towards the abyss, with which it grows, at its narrowest end, into the built-up staircase of the Cave Church of the Conception in the cliff itself.

A few meters before the entrance to the small temple, a corridor is separated from the terrace through the porch, which leads to the upper terraces attached to the cliff on the left and right side of the white Ostrog bell tower - with the church of the Honor. The cross and the ancient sharpshooter, miraculously erected on the spot where St. Basil had died in his cell.

Only the heart of the Ostrog shrine, calmly laid at the foot of the High Cross, in the cave temple of the Holy Mother of God with the Holy Reverend St. Basil, misses its small doors, through which only children and old men can pass without deep bending. And there, in the heart of the sanctuary, before the Holy Table, under the Holy Cross of the Imperial Doors and the icons of Our Lord and His Most Holy Mother of God with the Blessed Virgin in her arms, drawn directly aside, by the very wall of the temple cave, under the gaze of Saint Emperor Constantine and Empress Helen, Saint The Saves of the Serbian and Holy Warriors from the frescoes, as in the golden ship, anchored in the imperial port, silence the eternally awake Holy Revenge of the Holy "servant of God" Basil, the originator of the grace power of God.

This is where you finally reach the sacred Ostroh source of the gospel "light," which you longed for, and which by the works of inexhaustible grace "silently" shone before you, as well as before the myriads of devotees before you, inviting them all from afar, the miraculous light to which you rejoice greatly, " glorifying our Father who is in heaven. "

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