History
The childless nobleman Konstanty Dołmat, an adherent of Orthodoxy who had acquired Dziatlavičy in 1618, donated his estates — Dziatlavičy, Luninyets and Mialiasnica — to the village's Church of the Transfiguration on condition that monks of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra found a men's monastery there. According to the historian Antoni Mironowicz, the monastery had already been founded in 1560 by Prince Konstanty Ostrogski, was closed for several years after the Union of Brest, and was revived in 1622 thanks to Dołmat. The monastery was built between 1622 and 1625; the name "New Cave" (Novapiačerski) reflected its foundation by monks of the Kyiv Cave (Pechersk) Lavra. The Słownik geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego dates the foundation to 1622.
During the wars of the mid-17th century the monastery's documents were taken to the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, where they burned in 1667; in 1669 King Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki confirmed the Lavra's rights to Dziatlavičy and Luninyets. In 1676 King John III Sobieski again confirmed the monastery's rights to the estate, which comprised 808 valoka of land. In 1678 Feodosy Vasilevich, bishop, archimandrite of Slutsk and hegumen of the monastery, who had died in Lublin, was buried there by the Greek metropolitan Makarios Ligaridis.
The monastery was a cultural and educational centre of Polesia. It had a large library of old manuscripts and printed books, a bookbinding workshop, workshops for repairing and renewing church plate, an icon-painting workshop and a hospital, as well as an inn, a mill, a sawmill, a smithy and an apiary. It remained in the possession of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra until 1786; at the end of the 18th century it was described as "the only rich one among many impoverished" monasteries. During the war of 1812 it sheltered plundered residents and treated wounded Russian soldiers, and it supported the Slutsk theological seminary. In 1823 a wooden Church of the Transfiguration was built at the monastery's expense. By the middle of the 19th century the monastery had become much poorer, and it was closed in 1855.
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