What is the stage at the beginning of Lent? How the monks experience it

What is the stage at the beginning of Lent? How the monks experience it

Why do we lose contact with the monks on Holy Week? Why don't they answer and isolate themselves for three whole days and talk to no one? Find out everything about the Stadium that the monks go through after Tyrophagou Sunday and this ordeal, what it reminds them of.

Tyrophagous Sunday, during which the cheese and other seasonings are catalyzed for the last day before the start of the fast of the essentially fifty days of Lent, is the milestone for the start of the race, which reminds of the withdrawal of Jesus Christ to the desert, where he fasted and prayed for 40 days, tempted by the devil, so that he did not give in to the three temptations.

So on the night of Tyrophagus Sunday is held in the Katholikon of the Monastery the Vespers and then the bank is provided, during which various are sung overnight tropes and the Supper is celebrated, after which all the monks, after first worshiping the Holy Gospel, they ask forgiveness from the abbot and from all the brothers and then everyone withdraws to his cell.

They are going to pass a three-day period with more intense prayer and reading both in the Bible and in the Fathers of the Church with texts related to the period of the games of Lent, as well as to the Ladder of St. John of Sinai, which is read during the bank of the monks throughout Lent.

The monks in the Skete follow the same pattern.

This means that for three days most monks abstain not only from food but also from water, except of course the patients. During this three-day period, they leave their cells to go only to the sacred services in the Katholikon of the Monastery or on the Sunday of the Skete and abstain from any other activity and contact with the world.

That is, abstention from any communications that could disrupt this severe three-day isolation, according to the solitary tradition.

At the same time, the catechisms of Saint Theodore of Studitis, as well as texts of Saint Ephraim of Syros, as well as texts from the Lausaikos of Ioannis Moschos, begin to be read from Holy Monday during the procession of Orthros and until Friday, the feast of Saint Lazarus. depending on the standard of each Monastery.

The reading of the Psalms and the Holy Gospel is also doubled during the sacred services.

One of the most beautiful sequences of Lent is the sequence of the Great Supper with the all-night trophies, such as "Our God is drunk" and the "Lord of Powers".

On Holy Wednesday the Divine Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts is celebrated, where the hymns "Let my prayer be directed" and "Now the Forces of the heavens" are sung in a melodic way, followed by the quotation of a fasting table, during which the monks taste food without oil until the first Saturday, during which The miracle of Saint Theodore through the huts is celebrated.