Piva Monastery is a symbol of the invincible spirituality of Montenegro. A modest-looking cloister was built in the 16th century, when troops of the Ottoman Empire dominated most of the country.
The heart and soul of the monastery: the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared due to the efforts of the future patriarch of Serbia - Metropolitan Savzat Sokolovich Herzegovinsky.
Outside, the church looks extremely simple, no elaborate decorations - just three naves without an upper dome. The entrance is also very modest, we didn’t even find it right away, first mistaking it for service ... It was all the more unusual to find inside the magnificent temple decoration: more than 1.2 thousand square meters of unique frescoes painted by the best icon painters of the country, a rare-looking iconostasis in gilded riza , the authorship of which belongs to the famous Kozma Jovan.
Even at the first stages of construction, Savvatiy Sokolovich made a cunning hiding place where the monastery’s main treasures — utensils, jewelry, valuable manuscripts, but, first of all, of course, the miraculous relics of saints, of which there are many ....
Such deliberate external modesty of the temple more than once saved it from plunder in troubled times, making it possible to preserve the shrines of Montenegrin Orthodoxy until today!
And that's not all, in the 70s of the last century the monastery survived yet another fateful event, which put its very existence into question. Due to the construction of a hydroelectric power station on the Piva River and the risk of its complete flooding, the temple was completely moved from its old place to a new one, three kilometers higher on the mountainside.
I immediately recall the story of the Egyptian temple of Abu Simbel in Aswan, the transfer of which, 200 meters away from the Nile, became six years earlier the largest engineering and archaeological operation in the world.
The Piva Monastery is not such a large-scale construction, but nevertheless, the transfer of the temple took more than a decade - from 1970 to 1982. From its walls was removed and transferred 1260 square meters. meters of frescoes. The temple itself was completely dismantled and moved stone by stone to a new place, where it was successfully recreated in its original form.
And finally, again the "Russian trace"! The monastery still holds the letter of Emperor Alexander I, issued by the monastery in 1816 about the annual financial assistance of the Russian government to the Piva Monastery, which lasted until the 1917 revolution ....