Russian monks hope for return of bells from US

THE Danilov Monastery’s original 17th century bells ended up at Harvard University 73 years ago - spared destruction from a state atheism campaign. Now the monks are hoping to get them back.

The 18 bells stopped ringing in Russia after the dictator Josef Stalin shut the monastery in 1930 and turned it into a camp for orphans as part of his campaign against religion. All but three of its monks were later executed.

The bells, however, were saved from being melted down when American industrialist Charles Crane bought and then donated them to Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Soon after the monastery was restored to the faithful in 1983, the monks began to petition Harvard but had no success. The bell tower over the monastery’s St. Simon of the Stylites church, razed during Soviet times, has been rebuilt and life has returned to the monastery.

At a meeting with monastery representatives at Harvard last month, university officials agreed to finance a study of the feasibility and costs of removing and replacing the bronze bells.

During the visit, the monastery’s chief bell ringer, Heirodeacon Roman Ogryzkov, got his first chance to ring the bells, the oldest of which was cast in 1682.

"Ringing them made a great impression on me, especially as during their pealing I understood that these were the very same bells that our forefathers, our brothers, had rung - that they are witnesses to the history of our monastery," he said.

The Danilov Monastery, named for its 13th-century founder Prince Daniil of Moscow, does not dispute Harvard’s legal ownership of the bells.

The monks express gratitude to the institution for providing a safe haven for them during Stalin’s repression of the dominant Russian Orthodox Church.