Lepavina Monastery

Lepavina

The Lepavina Monastery: the church of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, with the chapel of St Tikhon of Zadonsk (left) and dormitory (right)
Monastery information
Full name	Manastir Lepavina, Манастир Лепавина
Order	Serbian Orthodox
Established	1550
Dedicated to	Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Site
Location	Lepavina, near Koprivnica, Croatia
Public access	Yes

The Lepavina Monastery (Serbian Cyrillic: Манастир Лепавина) is a Serbian Orthodox monastery dedicated to the Presentation of Mary and located at the village of Sokolovac, near the town of Koprivnica in Croatia.

According to an old local chronicle, the Lepavina monastery was founded around 1550, very soon after the emergence of the first Serbian settlements in this region. A monk from the Hilandar Monastery (on the Athos peninsula, Greece), Jefrem (Ephraim) Vukodabović, born in Herzegovina, together with two monks from Bosnia, built a wooden church here. They were soon joined by several other monks and the institution, according to the chronicle, acquired the status of a monastery.

In August 1557, Turks and the Islamized inhabitants of Stupčanica, Pakrac and Bijela, under the leadership of Zarep-Agha Ali, burnt down the church and the monastic buildings, four monks were killed and two taken to slavery.

In 1598 Hieromonk Gregory, also from the Hilandar Monastery, came to Lepavina with two monks from the Mileševa Monastery, and they re-established the monastic community and rebuilt the edifices. In 1630 the Orthodox population of this region, due to their constant involvement in the fights against the Turks and their allies, received great privileges, which created the conditions for building activity on a larger scale.

Archimandrite Visarion (Bessarion) came to Lepavina in 1635 to become the head of the community, and under his auspices in 1636-1642 a larger monastery complex developed.

In June 1642 Count Johannes Galler confirmed the rights of the monastery to all the possessions donated by the dwellers of Branjska and Sesvečani. The same was done in charters by Baron Sigmund von Eibiswald, Voivode Gvozden with Đorđe Dobrojević, Blaže Pejašinović and Voivode Radovan (5 February 1644), Baron Honorius von Trauttmansdorff (10 July 1644) and Count Georg Ludwig von Schwarzenberg (23 November 1644).