Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

"The Virgin's footprint on the rock of Pochaiv"

Pochaev, Ternópil (Ucrania)

In Pochaiv, in the oblast of Ternopil, in the west of Ukraine, the great Laura of the Sleeping of the Mother of God, one of the country's largest Marian shrines, of medieval root, rises. It is a place of worship mainly orthodox, but very venerated also by the Greek-Catholic, and the Mother of God of Pochaiv is loved by the faithful of Ukraine and the diaspora.

The oldest tradition tells that, about 1198, a monk went up to the mountain to pray and saw a column of fire appear, which also saw some shepherds; when the fire withdrew, the Virgin Mary was revealed on a rock. In the stone was the mark of his foot, from which a spring of water, a source of healing, sprung, and from there was born devotion. Later it is told the arrival of a Marian icon that would become the main of Pochaiv, and the miraculous defense of the monastery in front of an invasion of Turkish tribes in 1675, when the Virgin, with St. Job of Pochaiv and a host of angels, would have spread her white mantle over the monastery, diverting the arrows.

Tradition and history should be distinguished. The existence of Laura has been documented since medieval times, the presence of a venerated Marian icon at least since the 16th century and the situation of the monastery on a border disputed with the Ottoman Empire. On the other hand, the apparition of 1198, the column of fire, the footprint and the spring belong to the genus of the hagiographic legend, collected very later; and the supernatural elements of the defense of 1675 - the vision of the Virgin, the mantle, the deviated arrows - belong to the faith of the people and the internal chronicles of the monastery, without confirmation by external sources. The figures of hundreds of registered miracles are internal tradition, not checked by independent historians.

The Rosary, in its western form, is not the prayer of the Orthodox cult of Pochaiv; in the Greek-Catholic field Marian devotion is intense, but there is no specific link of this advocation to the Rosary.