Ascension Monastery of Banchen

The Ascension Monastery of Banchen stands in the village of Banchen, in the Hertsa district of the Chernivtsi region¹. The directory of monasteries of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church lists the monastery among those of the Chernivtsi and Bukovyna eparchy¹.

The monastery opened a video channel of its own on 30 April 2021; over those years about three thousand recordings have gathered on it². The backbone of the broadcasts is the Saturday all-night vigil and the Sunday Liturgy: Saturday and Sunday together account for more than seven of every ten completed broadcasts². Between them run weekday liturgies, consecrations, molebens and processions, and beside the services themselves the channel shows sermons - in the titles there are almost as many of them as of the liturgies themselves².

The broadcasts gather into two daily waves, a morning one and an afternoon one². The shortest run about a quarter of an hour, the longest more than six; the longest fell on the Day of the Holy Trinity, Pentecost². Beside the services themselves the monastery posts a great deal separately: for every live broadcast there are about three short recordings - mostly sermons and announcements - so that there is noticeably more ready-made video on the channel than there are broadcasts².

The monastery signs itself in two languages, Ukrainian and Romanian, and titles its broadcasts in three, adding Russian². The channel is seldom silent: a gap longer than four days does not occur on it².