BEARSVILLE >> As the snow swirls on a foreboding morning, a group of men keeps watch and prays.
By now, natural light filters into a tiny chapel adorned with tapered candles and treasured icons of the saints. It is a sacred space where the monks pray daily from their promontory overlooking Catskill Park.
The cloister, part of the Genuine Orthodox Christians in America, gathers several times a day, including 4:15 a.m., to call on heaven for mercy and salvation. They remember the sick, poor and afflicted, as well as the church faithful.
In their daytime chores or quiet time at the end of the day, the 17 men who live at Holy Ascension Monastery in Bearsville pray individually for purification and illumination. Mostly, they look to God for blessings on their mission and those who believe in it.
Right now, a big part of that is fulfilling the dream of monastery founder Metropolitan Paul Stratigeas, who envisioned one day recreating the great Byzantine cathedral known as Hagia Sophia, which is now a museum in Istanbul, Turkey.
Unknown to many outside of northwestern Ulster County, that dream is becoming a reality on a hilltop off Cold Brook Road in Bearsville. Five bishops and four priests blessed the foundations for the new church on June 2, 2011, and, today, a building is slowly taking shape.
According to Father Sergius Gordon, a deacon at Holy Ascension, it will serve as “catholicon,” or main church, of the monastery.
Though the building is a one-fifth scale replica of the original 180- by 269-foot Hagia Sophia built by Emperor Justinian the Great in 532 A.D., it is, nonetheless, an ambitious project with a price tag expected to run close to $1.5 million in the years to come. The monastery quadrangle surrounding it will cost $2.5 million.
So far, $250,000 has gone into it, Sergius said.
Just how Bearsville became the chosen site for such magnificence is due largely to what the monks consider a miracle.
Through a monk’s father, who is the priest at St. Maximus in Owego, a town in Tioga County, they met Mark Arrow, a master stone mason who built St. Maximus; and designer William Hall, the staff architect at the State University of New York at Binghamton.
The pair saw it as a chance to shine and have been working on the structure, made of autoclaved aerated concrete brick units, from the start.
“We knew Mark Arrow had the capabilities to build a church as Metropolitan Paul had envisioned,” Father Sergius said. “Bill has also taken a very strong interest in this church, which is really revolutionary in the history of architecture.”
Throughout the ages, Hagia Sophia has been regarded as the “jewel of the queen of cities” and is considered a masterpiece and one of the most famous in Orthodox Christianity, said Sergius, who sits on the building committee.
“Since the center of our life is worship, we feel it is important to have a beautiful setting for worship,” he said. “We are doing this in deference to our founder’s vision, and we’re doing this in obedience that God will provide.”
Driven by that, a few of the monks are lending a hand in the construction of the cathedral, which is expected to be what Father Sergius calls “a beacon of Orthodoxy in the region” and “a unique building” for America.
“The original Hagia Sophia was revolutionary in character,” he said. “Our church is just a copy of that, using modern equivalents, but its masonry-compression structure is something very rare today.”
Once the structure is built, church leaders will not be surprised to see an influx of Eastern Orthodox Christians into the area, Father Sergius added. They already are the major benefactors of the project and have come to the region primarily for the feast day of the Ascension.
“The majority of our faithful are in New York City and the Boston area, so they are generally between two and four hours away. A community will probably gather closer after it’s up. That usually is the case.”
Meanwhile, daily routines continue at Holy Ascension, a 37-acre property that Metropolitan Paul bought in 1999, the year he founded the monastery.
“He was looking at several (properties),” Father Sergius said. “The day he visited this one it was the feast day of Eustathios, who was converted while he was out hunting and Christ crucified appeared to him in the antlers of a deer. He and his family became Christians. They were all martyred.
“Metropolitan Paul visited … and saw the emblem of St. Eustathius praying (on a wood stove) and said, ‘It’s a sign. This is where we’re supposed to be.'”
Fittingly, St. Eustathios is the patron saint of the monastery. The monks, who take vows of poverty and vary in age from their 20s to their 70s, live in a peasantlike 19th-century farmhouse with seven bedrooms, a living room, a large community dining room and chapel.
They are secluded, but not isolated, from the world and can take day trips when relatives visit. The monks also operate a community food pantry seven days a week.
Each of them has a chore, or “obedience,” he carries out daily to keep the community functioning,
The 56-year-old Father Sergius is charged with making the beeswax candles, the main source of income for the enclave. In a barn near the farmhouse, he and two others string, dip and package the products by hand. They also haul, melt and strain all the wax themselves.
Holy Ascension sells between two and three tons of candles annually, mainly to parishes from the East to West Coasts and to the public from their gift shop.
The monastery recently picked up accounts at the Gilded Carriage gift shop at 95 Tinker St. in Woodstock, as well as Woodstock Hardware at 84 Tinker St.
Father Sergius is anxious to receive a candle-making machine in the coming months from parishioners in Toronto, Canada, something that will increase output.
“For me to make 35 pounds of candles, it takes between an hour and an hour and 20 minutes, and that’s with three men,” he said. “We think, as our numbers increase, we may look at some other ways of income, and we entertained the idea of having a micro-brewery here. But, right now, it’s too much of an investment in equipment.”
The monks do enjoy their beer – some of it homemade – once or twice a week and consider it a treat. They also use some modern-day technology, such as computers, smart phones, iPads and the Internet.
“They’re simply tools for us, and we use it under very strict perimeters,” Father Sergius said. “The only thing we use computers for are for business. We don’t surf the Internet. We usually don’t look at secular news or events. It’s just part of the modern world.”
The techies among them also have revamped the monastery website, ascensionmonastery.org, aware that it’s the community’s “public face,” according to Father Sergius. “We’re blessed to have a novice, Brother John, who is a graduate of Pratt (Institute) with us.”
They’re also counting on more supporters to back their building project as word spreads and the website gets more views.
“We hope to have (the) shell of the church finished in two to three years, but it will take several decades to build the entire monastery,” Father Sergius said. “We are building this church to last. We hope it will be here for centuries and centuries.
“God wants us here for a reason – to be a witness to this ancient form of Christianity, which many people don’t know about it.”
