Supraśl Orthodox Monastery

The white walls by the River Supraśl hide one of the most important centres of Orthodox Christianity in Poland, and a history that has changed direction several times. The Monastery of the Annunciation was founded by the Lithuanian marshal Aleksander Chodkiewicz around the turn of the 16th century. Its main church was blown up by retreating German troops in 1944, and rebuilding it took 37 years – it was consecrated again only in 2021.

History: from Gródek to Supraśl

The monks first settled in nearby Gródek and moved to the Suchy Hrud clearing by the River Supraśl in the first decade of the 16th century. A tomos approving the foundation was issued in 1505 by the Patriarch of Constantinople, and King Alexander Jagiellon confirmed the founding charter. In the 16th century the lavra kept close ties with monasteries in Kyiv, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece, and Serbian icon painters decorated the church with frescoes. The library held about 200 books in 1557 and 587 by 1645, making it one of the largest monastic collections in the country.

In the early 17th century the monastery passed to the Uniate (Greek Catholic) Church, and from 1635 it was run by Basilian monks. They extended the complex and set up a printing house which, from 1693, published around 500 titles – 71 per cent of them in Polish. In 1824 the monastery returned to the Orthodox Church. In 1915 the monks fled into Russia, taking with them the miraculous Icon of Our Lady of Supraśl. After the Second World War the buildings housed an agricultural school. From the 1980s the complex was gradually returned to the Orthodox Church, and in 2022 eight monks lived here.

What to see

• The Church of the Annunciation – a fortified church with four round corner towers and loopholes beneath the cornice. Inside are reconstructed frescoes and a four-tier iconostasis made in 2021 by the Ukrainian carver Oleh Belts of Pochaiv.
• The Icon Museum in the Archimandrites' Palace (1635–1655), a branch of the Podlasie Museum. The exhibition, open since 2007, shows about 300 icons and liturgical objects in 9 rooms, some styled as a hermit's cave or a village cottage. Surviving fragments of the church's 16th-century frescoes are displayed separately.
• The gate tower and belfry from 1752, modelled on the gate of the Branicki Palace in Białystok.
• The catacombs beneath the lost Church of the Resurrection, with 132 burial niches from the 16th century.

Interesting facts

Many of the icons in the Podlasie Museum's collection were seized by customs officers from smugglers at Poland's eastern border and handed to the museum once the court cases were closed. In 1823 the priest Michał Bobrowski found the Codex Suprasliensis in the monastery library – an 11th-century manuscript in Old Church Slavonic. Today it is split between Warsaw, Ljubljana and St Petersburg, and in 2007 it was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. In 2020 Andrzej Duda became the first Polish president ever to visit the lavra.

Tripto tip

The monastery is at ul. Klasztorna 1 in the centre of Supraśl, a short drive north-east of Białystok. It is a working monastery and parish church, so dress modestly and do not walk around the church during services. Allow 1–1.5 hours for the Icon Museum and about two hours including the church and courtyard. Check opening hours and ticket prices on the Podlasie Museum website before you go. Combine the visit with a walk along the river and among the small town's wooden houses on the edge of the Knyszyn Forest.