Kurisumala Ashram
Kurisumala Ashram is a Cistercian Monastery in Syro-Malankara Catholic Church in the Sahya Mountains in Kerala, India. Kurisu is the translation of the word cross into Malayalam, the language of Kerala; mala means mountain; ashram means monastery. Hence, the name describes the community of monks who practise austerity and live a strict monastic life on the mount of the Cross in the high hills of Kerala.
It was at the invitation of Zacharias Mar Athanasios, the Bishop of Tiruvalla, that Fr. Francis Mahieu, a Cistercian monk from the Scourmont Abbey, in Belgium (later known as Francis Acharya) came to Kerala to start the ashram. In the course of time, Bede Griffiths joined him there. On 1 December 1956, the two of them started the new foundation at Tiruvalla in the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church. Eventually they were successful in obtaining 88 acres (360,000 m2) of land and on 20 March 1958, the eve of St Benedict’s day, Fr. Francis, Fr. Bede, and two seminarians traveled sixty miles to the site, high up on the holy mountain of Kurisumala. Well contented with their hilltop, they spent the next few months in a hut made of bamboo and plaited palm leaves with no facilities, no furniture, and a floor covered simply with cow dung. While the center of their lives was the prayer of the Church and celebration of its feasts and mysteries, they had to find a way of supporting themselves, so they soon started a dairy farm with cattle imported from Jersey.
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