Pestera si Manastirea Sf Ioan Casian – Monastery and Cave



Saturday February 12th I was inspired enough to take part in JCI Constanta’s JCI Play 4×4 event. It was announced as a softroad expedition combined with outdoor activities and networking. It turned out everything we had hoped for and then some.  I will not post photos from the offroad part, because we just put on a bit of a show to entertain the audience, and there were enough photographers concentrating on that. What I will show you are some photos I managed to grab at the final point of our trip, the Sf Ioan Casian Monastery.

The monastery is still under construction (being quite a young monastery) but it features a cave, the original cave where St Ioan Casian used to live. In order to get from the monastery yard to the actual cave, we did need to put our navigation skills to test, because the signs are confusing, to say the least and an autumn rain was starting to pour over us:

Descent on the hill to the entrance into the cave

when we finished the descent we found out that we then needed to climb back a part of our descent, but this time on a much steeper approach:

St Casian Cave Entrance

On the “inside” there is a small praying area and a claustrophobic “room” that can only be accessed with a bit of crawling …

St Casian Cave - Inside

As it happens, by the time we got back down on the fragile-equilibrium cast-iron ladder and the back up on the improvised stairway, everybody else was already finishing their lunch. We thanked the organizers, shook some hands and took back to Constanta with this warm image making it’s way into the memories vault:

Sunset at Casian Monastery - HD