Metravel city quest
City Zhyrovichy: free walking route “Zhirovichi quest: the icon on a pear tree” along the sights. 6 points. Approximately 2 h. Quests and legends - straight
In spring 1470, young shepherds tending cattle in the forests of Alexander Soltan, a boyar and treasurer of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, saw a strange glow among the trees. Light shone from a wild pear tree. In its branches stood a tiny icon of the Mother of God and Child, carved in jasper, the size of a child's palm: 5.7 by 4.1 centimetres. It is the smallest of the venerated icons of the Mother of God. The shepherds took it to their master, who paid it little attention and locked it in a casket. Next morning, intending to show the curiosity to his guests, Soltan opened the casket and found nothing. The icon was back on the same pear tree. Then he understood and built a wooden church on the site of the apparition. According to tradition, a spring began flowing at the tree's roots.
Around 1520 the settlement burned almost to the ground. The church burned too, and the icon vanished in the fire. People searched the ashes without success. Then peasant children saw a radiantly beautiful Virgin standing on a stone beside the burned church. The adults who came found the icon on that stone, whole and unharmed. This was its second apparition. For five and a half centuries people have come to Zhirovichi. Around the tiny icon grew the Holy Dormition Stavropegial Monastery for men, a major centre of Belarusian Orthodoxy and the country's largest XVII–XVIII-century architectural ensemble.
Today you will follow this legend: from the bell tower and great cathedral, whose altar still shelters that spring, to the monastery's oldest church and the stone of the second apparition, then uphill to the church with its Holy Stairs, and on to the spring and bathing houses visited from across the country. With a car and time, you can visit Synkovichi, a fortress church from another legend.
Before starting: this is a working monastery where people come to pray. Wear modest clothing, with no shorts or bare shoulders; women wear a headscarf and skirt (available at the entrance if needed). Do not photograph inside churches or film monks, and silence your phone. All quest tasks are outside churches or very quiet, so you will disturb nobody.
The walking route is a little over a kilometre without retracing your steps. We begin at the bell tower across the road from the cathedral.
The route points in order — what these places are and why they are interesting. Tasks and answers stay inside the quest.
From the bell tower you can already see the monastery's layout. It stands across the road from the Dormition Cathedral, precisely on its axis, even echoing its outline.
Cross the road to the monastery's main church, the Dormition Cathedral. Work on the stone church began in 1613 and finished by 1650.
Walk a little farther east from the cathedral, into the monastery, to the small church linked to this place's second beginning. Remember the fire of 1520 and the children who saw the Virgin on a stone beside the burned church?
Climb a little farther from the Apparition Church. The Exaltation of the Cross Church stands at the monastery's highest point, deliberately: the entire church is a symbol.
Water is this story's second thread after the icon. A spring appeared at the pear tree's roots, and it still flows beneath the cathedral's altar.
This optional stop is an excursion by car. Synkovichi village is about twenty kilometres away, too far for this walk.
This route is part of Metravel city quests. Below are the other quests in this city and cities with quests nearby.