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A lavra or laura (Greek: Λαύρα; Cyrillic: Ла́вра) is a type of monastery consisting of a cluster of cells or caves for hermits, with a church and sometimes a refectory at the center. It is erected within the Orthodox and other Eastern Christian traditions. The term in Greek initially meant a narrow lane or an alley in a city.[1][2]



Saint Euthymius the Great (377-473) founded one of the early Lavras in fifth-century Palestine.[5] The Lavra of Saint Sabbas the Sanctified (†532), known as Mar Saba, is one of the most ancient and almost continuously functioning monasteries in the Christian Church.


Some modern Coptic authors, and they alone, already apply the specific Greek term lavra to even earlier monastic settlements from the Nitrean desert and even attribute the writing down of the formal rules of a lavra to the Egyptian sanctified monk Macarius the Great in AD 330. Unless proven otherwise by future scholarship, this opinion seems to be theirs alone.

Their claim is that the lavrite style of living has its origins in the early fourth century, by equating the creation of the first lavras with the founding of a settlement of cells in the Nitrean desert at a site known as Nitria, named for the nearby town of the same name. It was a community of 600 hermits who lived scattered over the area, reliant on the town of Nitria for bread, but with their own priest and church. [6]



List of lavras[edit]

See also[edit]


  2. ^ Kazhdan, Alexander P., ed. (1991). "Lavra". The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
  3. ^ Catholic Encyclopedia entry for Laura.
  4. ^ Lewin (2005), p. 188.
  5. ^ Parry (1999), p. 294.
  6. ^ Monasticism, Daniel Al-Antouny (ed.)



External links[edit]