On 17 January 2025 the Pochaev Holy Dormition Lavra refused access to its bell tower and archbishop's house to an inventory commission set up by the Kremenets-Pochaiv State Historical and Architectural Reserve on the instruction of the Ministry of Culture and Strategic Communications. Olha Rutkovska, head of the cultural institutions coordination division of the ministry's Cultural Heritage Department, reported this to Ukrinform.
The inspection of those two buildings had been agreed the day before and a representative of the technical inventory bureau was to take part in it, she said; at the entrance to the bell tower representatives of the house stated in writing that they would not grant access. Members of the commission called the police and filed statements about obstruction of their work, and the communications division of the National Police directorate in the Ternopil region told Ukrinform that the complaints had been registered and the circumstances were being established.
The commission has been at work since 11 December 2024 and its term was set to run until 28 February 2025. Its head, the director of the reserve Vasyl Ilchyshyn, told Ukrinform that the buildings the house uses are under the reserve's operational management and that the purpose of the inventory is to establish the number and the state of preservation of movable objects: church utensils, icons and iconostases.
The Lavra's lawyer Yurii Dobrinov, according to the same report, said that the reserve's order No. 180 of 3 December 2024, which created the temporary commission, was being challenged in administrative procedure. The house itself went to court to have the instruction of the ministry's state secretary declared void, and the Kyiv District Administrative Court left that claim without movement.
The press secretary of the house, archimandrite Havryil, said that the actions of the reserve's representatives are not provided for by the agreement on the use of the Lavra's buildings which the brethren concluded with the State Construction Committee of Ukraine in 2003, and that the reserve gives the brethren no data on the results of earlier inventories. The monks do not object, he said, to a repeat listing of the 58 items of applied art on a 1967 schedule, but they do not allow an inventory of property photographed without their permission during a check in June.
Vasyl Ilchyshyn replied to Ukrinform that there are not 58 such objects but hundreds, recorded in schedules of various years.
On 20 January 2025 the brethren addressed a letter to the director of the reserve. The letter states that the planned inventory covers all the church utensils in the Dormition and Trinity cathedrals and in the monastic cells, that the state never transferred those utensils to the monastery, and that the state secretary's instruction was issued beyond his competence. Separately, archimandrite Havryil noted that the new act also covers the relics of Saint Job of Pochaiv.
Sources: Ukrinform, 17 January 2025; Ukrinform, 24 January 2025; Information and Education Department of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, 18 January 2025; the same department, 21 January 2025; hromadske, 21 January 2025.
