Did you know that

monks of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra were involved in the development of the "Rights on which the people of Little Rus’ are judged" - a collection of legal norms that were in force on Left-Bank Ukraine?

By order of Emperor Peter II in 1728, a commission was established to reduce the "Rights on which the people of Little Rus’ are judged" to a single model. The commission met in Glukhov and temporarily in Moscow. Its activity lasted 15 years. Hetman Danylo Apostol initiated the involvement of learned monks of the Kyiv-Pechersk Monastery in the development of this document. He repeatedly asked Archimandrites Ioanniki (Senyutovych) and Roman (Kopa) to select the ablest members of the brethren and send them to Glukhov. Not all monks wanted to take part in long-term work (the legal books of Magdeburg law, Lithuanian statutes, Chelm law, etc. had to be collected, rewritten, translated into Russian, and structured by paragraphs). From the correspondence of the archimandrites with Yakov Lyzogub, the chairman of the commission, it would seem that monks constantly fled from Glukhov. Barnabas, the hegumen of the St. Nicholas Hospital Monastery, having promised Archimandrite Timothy (Scherbatsky) that he would work on legal books "until his last breath" actually hid with his relatives for several years.

Picture captions:

1. Cover page of the "Rights on which the people of Little Rus’ are judged". 1745

The text was prepared by Hanna Filipova