Optina Today

Restored since 1987, Optina Pustyn is again a working monastery and one of the foremost pilgrimage centers of the Russian Orthodox Church: the skete rebuilt, the historic publishing house revived, the relics of the elders enshrined, and a brotherhood numbering well over a hundred. The harder question is whether the eldership itself — the charismatic starchestvo of the nineteenth-century Optina — continues, and the discussions around it are sober: the tradition is honored, the institution not lightly claimed, and the cautions about “elder-seeking” that the Russian tradition itself voices are kept in view. Shamordino, the women’s convent Ambrose founded, has likewise been revived.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

The Monastery’s State

Optina Pustyn, near Kozelsk on the river Zhizdra in Kaluga province, was returned to the Church in 1987 and reopened after some sixty-five years of desolation (it had been closed in 1923). Monastic life resumed before the end of the USSR, and the monastery was rebuilt through the 1990s and 2000s: the cathedrals restored, and the skete — the hermitage where the great elders had lived and received visitors — reconstructed (the repository’s note in Russian Monasticism; the monastery’s own history, optina.ru, as locator).

As of the early 2020s the brotherhood numbers over one hundred monks, living a rigorous cycle of daily Liturgy and the full round of Orthodox services (Grokipedia / OrthodoxWiki, Optina Monastery, as locators; verify current figures against optina.ru). The monastery’s publishing house has been revived, issuing editions of the patristic Fathers, the letters and lives of the Optina elders, and spiritual-instructional literature distributed to pilgrims and to other Orthodox institutions — a deliberate continuation of the nineteenth-century Optina editions. Pilgrimage is on a large scale: Optina is among the most visited monasteries in Russia, with the shrine of St. Ambrose and the relics of the seven enshrined elders (see canonization-1988) as its principal goals (these are as-of-2026 notes; the scale of pilgrimage and the brotherhood’s size fluctuate and should be checked against current monastery reporting).

The restoration has been deliberately faithful to the historic plan. The main monastery enclosure, with its cathedrals, stands distinct from the skete a short distance off through the woods — the same arrangement that, in the nineteenth century, allowed the elders to live a hesychast life of relative seclusion in the skete while still receiving the stream of visitors. That topography mattered to the old eldership and has been preserved: the skete is again a place of quiet, the cathedrals the place of the crowds and the relics. Optina also keeps the graves and memory of its modern dead, including the three monks killed in 1993, whose burial place within the monastery has itself become a site of veneration. The monastery is, in short, not a museum reconstruction but a living community that has resumed the round of prayer, work, hospitality, and publishing that defined it before 1917.

The revived publishing house deserves particular notice, because it makes the monastery’s continuity with its nineteenth-century self concrete. The press that once issued the Optina editions of Climacus, Isaac the Syrian, and the rest (see The Optina Editions) now issues the lives and letters of the very elders who oversaw that earlier work, together with patristic and instructional literature for the pilgrim and the inquirer. There is a closed circle here: the editions that formed the elders are reprinted by the monastery the elders made famous, alongside the writings of those elders themselves. A pilgrim who buys a volume of Ambrose’s letters at Optina’s bookstall is holding the fruit of a publishing tradition that Ambrose helped build as a young monk — the tradition reading itself back to itself across the catastrophe that nearly ended it.

The Eldership Question Today

Whether starchestvo — eldership in the full Optina sense — continues at restored Optina is a genuine and openly discussed question, not a settled claim. The monastery preserves the memory and the texts of the elders, serves their relics, and forms its monks in their writings; spiritual fathers (dukhovniki) receive pilgrims and direct the brotherhood. But the charismatic starets of the type of Ambrose — the clairvoyant elder receiving thousands and discerning the will of God for a stranger’s life — is something the tradition itself does not manufacture on demand, and responsible Russian commentary is careful not to assert its automatic continuation (cf. the repository’s treatment of the post-Soviet revival in Russian Monasticism: “many new monks and nuns lack experienced spiritual directors, and the rapid growth has sometimes outpaced the availability of seasoned monastic leadership”).

The point can be put historically. The classical Optina eldership rested on an unbroken chain: Elder Leonid had received the Paisian tradition through Schemamonk Theodore, a direct disciple of St. Paisius; Macarius was formed under Leonid; Ambrose under Macarius; the later elders under Ambrose and his successors, down to Nectarius and Nikon in the twentieth century. Each starets was the disciple of a starets, and it was within that living relationship, over decades, that the gift of discernment was tested and transmitted. The Soviet destruction severed exactly this — not the books, which survived, but the master-to-disciple succession, which cannot be reconstituted by decree. A revived monastery inherits the texts and the relics at once; the formed elder it can only await.

This caution is not modern timidity; it is the tradition’s own teaching. The Orthodox sources warn repeatedly against “elder-seeking” — the spiritually dangerous appetite for a charismatic guide, and the readiness to grant any monk or priest the authority of a Barsanuphius or an Ambrose. The repository’s Spiritual Direction sets out the verified position, which this file must and does keep: the tradition does not teach blind or unlimited obedience; the spiritual father is not infallible; obedience may never contradict the faith and morals of the Church; lay obedience is more limited than monastic; “spiritual shopping” from one would-be elder to another is itself a sign of the unhealed will; and one should seek a sound, prayerful pastor rather than idealize and hunt for a wonder-working starets. St. Ignatius Brianchaninov — glorified, like Ambrose, in 1988 — had already taught that true elders had become rare and that the safer path in his own diminished age was guidance from the writings of the Fathers under a humble confessor, precisely the counsel that a restored Optina, conscious of the gap the Soviet rupture tore in the living chain of transmission, takes to heart (Brianchaninov, The Arena; Spiritual Direction). Optina today thus holds its inheritance honestly: it honors the eldership without presuming to have reproduced it.

It helps to name precisely what was broken and what survived. What the Soviet century destroyed was not the teaching of the elders — that is preserved in their letters and lives, much of it printed by the monastery’s own revived press — but the unbroken person-to-person chain of transmission, master to disciple, by which a starets is formed under a starets. Nectarius died in 1928, Nikon in exile in 1931, Isaac II shot in 1938; the living succession was cut. A monastery can reopen its walls in a year, but it cannot in a year regrow an elder of Ambrose’s stature, because such elders are the slow fruit of a continuous tradition, not of an institution’s decree. This is why the discussions about Optina’s present eldership are cautious where they are honest, and why the wiser voices counsel exactly what St. Ignatius Brianchaninov counseled a century and a half ago: in an age poor in true elders, seek a sound confessor and the guidance of the Fathers’ own writings, and beware the appetite for a wonder-worker. The repository’s Spiritual Direction gives this verified teaching in full, and nothing in restored Optina’s situation overturns it; if anything, the rupture of the twentieth century has made its caution more, not less, pertinent.

None of this diminishes the monastery. A place that preserves the relics, the texts, the topography, and the prayer of the elders, and that forms its monks in their spirit, is doing the essential thing — keeping the tradition alive so that, in God’s time, the fruit may come again. What it does not do is manufacture the fruit on schedule or sell it to the pilgrim hungry for a quick oracle. That restraint is itself a mark of fidelity to Ambrose, who directed souls toward humility and the Church’s common mind rather than toward the cult of his own person.

Shamordino Revived

The Kazan-St. Ambrose Convent at Shamordino, the women’s community Ambrose founded in 1884 and at which he died in 1891 (see Death at Shamordino), shared Optina’s fate: closed under the Soviets and returned to the Church in the post-Soviet revival, it has been reopened as a functioning convent and restored, standing again — as Ambrose intended it — as the women’s parallel to Optina’s monastic life, a few miles off across the same Kaluga countryside (optina.ru and the convent’s own reporting, as locators; cf. the founding narrative in Death at Shamordino).

The parallel between the two houses is structural, not merely sentimental. Ambrose founded Shamordino in 1884 as a community that would receive women the older, more aristocratic convents turned away — the poor, the sick, the unwanted — and he died there in October 1891 while staying to settle its affairs (see Death at Shamordino). Its revival therefore restores not only a building but a particular charism of mercy that was Ambrose’s own. Today the two foundations are again what the elder made them: Optina the great monastery of the elders, Shamordino its sister-house of women’s labor and prayer, the one anchoring the other across the fields between Kozelsk and the Zhizdra. To speak of “Optina today” without Shamordino would be to describe only half of what Ambrose built and the revival has restored.

A final word on the as-of character of all this. The figures and descriptions in this file — the size of the brotherhood, the scale of pilgrimage, the present state of the buildings and the convent — are notes for 2026 and will drift; they are offered as orientation, with the monastery’s and convent’s own current reporting (optina.ru) as the place to check them. What is durable is the shape: a monastery returned in 1987, restored through the following decades, serving the relics and texts of its elders, publishing again as it once did, holding the eldership in honored memory under the tradition’s own cautions, and standing beside its revived sister-convent — Ambrose’s twin foundations, raised a second time after the long Soviet night.

See Also

References

  • Brianchaninov, St. Ignatius. The Arena: An Offering to Contemporary Monasticism. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1991. (On the rarity of true elders and the guidance of the Fathers’ writings.)
  • Kontzevitch, I. M. Optina Pustyn’ i eyo vremya [Optina Pustyn and Its Era]. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1970.
  • Optina Pustyn Monastery. Documented history and reporting, optina.ru. (Locator for the monastery’s present state, the revived publishing house, the skete, and Shamordino; not a terminal citation.)
  • “Optina Monastery.” OrthodoxWiki / Grokipedia. (Locators for the revived publishing program and the present brotherhood; figures to be verified against current monastery reporting.)
  • Stanton, Leonard J. The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.