A gift as no other, a pair of African ostriches, came to the Svyatoozersky Monastery of Our Lady of Iberia at Valdai from the pious laity. The exotic birds feel fine in the forbidding climate of Russia's northwest, the brethren reassured Novosti.
The African guests have settled in a vast summer cage to share a mixed fodder diet with the other monastery poultry. A monk has been assigned to tend them.
Huge and picturesque, the birds came as another attraction in a monastery to which sightseers are flocking. So many were eager to pet the ostriches and give them a tasty morsel that the monks had to hang an announcement on the cage asking not to feed the feathered creatures.
Unlike tourists, Novgorodian experts on local history do not think there is anything surprising in the monastery ostriches. What we now see as exotic was everyday routine in mediaeval Russia, say staff researchers of the Novgorod State Museum Preserve.
Exotic birds and beasts were common presence not only in the Novgorodian land, with its comparatively mild climate, but even in the subarctic Solovki Monastery. Industrious monks grew tropical and subtropical plants-even grapes and pineapples were bringing fruit in their loving hands.
The reformer Patriarch Nikon founded the Svyatoozersky (Holy Lake) Monastery of Our Lady of Iberia in 1653, and Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich passed the prosperous abode into the Church Primate's private holding. The Patriarch ordered a copy of the miracle-working image of Our Lady of Iberia, one of the icons most worshipped in Christendom, brought to the Valdai monastery. It came from a Georgian monastery on Mount Iberia at New Athos.
Holy protector of Novgorod the Great and of Moscow, the precious icon disappeared as the monastery was ransacked in 1918.
The Russian Orthodox Church regained the monastic abode early in the 1990s. Vladimir Putin was Russia's first President to visit it. He came in August 2001, and gave the community another, 19th century copy of the icon of Our Lady of Iberia.
