SERPUKHOV, Russia, April 18 (AFP) - After spending five years in the hell of heroin addiction, Olga has found peace in an Orthodox monastery dating back to the Middle Ages.
In it are preserved icons reputed to have healing powers. "I had no choice. It was either this, or death or prison, said the pale-faced 30-year-old woman, who hails from the city of Togliatti, in central Russia.
She is wearing a long dark skirt and a black headscarf for her task of milking Malina and Riabina, the monastery's two cows. After that she will take them out of a ruined part of the monastery, which serves as a byre, to graze.
"I had never been near a cow before I came here," said Olga, smiling broadly.
For more than a year, Olga has been convalescing at the Vvedenskii Vladychnii monastery at Serpukhov, 80 kilometres (50 miles) south of Moscow.
She is sharing the pious existence of the monastery with four other heroin addicts and the establishment's 15 nuns, and she has no contact with the health authorities.
"We lodge them for free for close to a year. All that we ask is that they have made their choice of their own free will, and, of course, that they have been baptised into the Orthodox religion," said Mother Superior Alexia, who added there was no intention to turn the women into nuns.
"We also demand that they take certain health tests, notably for AIDS," said the mother superior, wearing her black cornet headdress and her matching habit.
"If they are infected, they are not allowed to work in the kitchen or the dairy," Alexia said.
She said that only one HIV-positive woman had been taken into the monastery since it began admitting addicts in 1997, but she had to leave soon because of her poor health.
With its little white-washed churches, its golden cupolas and its courtyard with walls of bleached brickwork, Vvedenskii Vladychnii is very like other Russian Orthodox monasteries -- with the difference that a number of icons reputed to have healing powers, one said to cure alcoholism and drug addiction, are kept there.
The Neupivaemaya Chasha (Inexhaustible Chalice), representing the mother and child, was visited by pilgrims suffering from drink problems in the 19th century, but disappeared after the 1917 revolution. A copy was donated to the monastery soon after it reopened in 1995.
"Of course, the icon does not make miracles to order," said Olga, who was not a practising Christian before her stay here. "But if one prays in front of it, one immediately feels a deep sense of peace."
Many of the women addicts have come here as a last resort, having undergone numerous failed cures in special clinics.
"My mother paid for me to be treated in a clinic, but my longest remission never lasted more than a month," said Tatiana, a 24-year-old from Vologda, northern Russia, who has been living in the monastery for nearly eight months.
In a chapel where she is scraping up wax from candles that dripped on to the floor, Anna, another former addict, admits that sometimes she still needs a fix.
I talk to Mother Natalia about it, she tells me how to pray, and I forget about it," Anna said.
In 2001, Russia counted more than two million drug addicts, more than 250,000 of whom were receiving treatment in state clinics, according to the health ministry.
020418
AF020451
Copyright © AFP or Agence France-Presse, 2002 - All Rights Reserved. AFP articles contained on the AEGiS web site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without AFP's prior written permission. You may make one copy of each article for your personal, non-commercial use only; more copies would require AFP's prior written permission.. http://www.afp.com/
AEGiS is made possible through unrestricted grants from Boehringer Ingelheim, the National Library of Medicine, and donations from users like you. Always watch for outdated information. This article first appeared in 2002. This material is designed to support, not replace, the relationship that exists between you and your doctor.
©1990, 2002 - AEGiS. AEGiS presents published material, reprinted with permission and neither endorses nor opposes any material. All materials appearing on AEGiS are protected by copyright as a collective work or compilation under U.S. copyright and other laws and are the property of AEGiS, or the party credited as the provider of the content.
