Church of St. Alexius, Man of God (Kharkiv)

The church of St Alexius the Man of God stands in Kharkiv at 317/319 Klochkivska Street and belongs to the Kharkiv eparchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, in the first deanery of the city¹. There was once a village here, and it took its name, as the eparchy itself cautiously puts it, most probably from the holy spring of St Alexius the Man of God; this district of Kharkiv took its name from the village, and the spring still flows¹.

The eparchy begins the history of the church with a church built in this locality in 1839 - of stone, with a single altar, consecrated in honour of the Nativity of the Most Holy Mother of God; in 1943, amid heavy fighting for Kharkiv, it was destroyed¹. The community in honour of St Alexius was opened by the then Metropolitan of Kharkiv and Bohodukhiv, and here the eparchy contradicts itself on a single page: its register field gives 22 September 2003, its account of the church 2004¹. At first the restored community served in a temporary church beside the spring¹.

On 15 January 2017 the Metropolitan of Kharkiv and Bohodukhiv served a moleben during which a capsule with a commemorative charter of its foundation was laid into the foundation of the church³. On 23 August 2019 the same bishop blessed the domes and the crosses for them⁴, and on 25 September 2022 he performed the rite of the Great Consecration and the first Divine Liturgy⁵. The building work is not counted as finished: the eparchy still designates the church in its register as one under construction, and the community keeps a separate collection about the building work on its channel^{1, 7}. The community keeps its patronal feast on 30 March, and in 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026 the ruling bishop of the eparchy served the Liturgy here on that day^{1, 6}.

Services are held every Saturday, every Sunday and on feast days: the Saturday evening service at 16:00, the Sunday Divine Liturgy at 9:00, and when a feast falls on a weekday at 8:00; this is the schedule the parish publishes itself². The community founded its own video channel on 16 June 2023, and its first months are a building diary: the preparation of the foundation, the assembly of the columns, the raising of the dome⁷. It has been broadcasting live since the end of the summer of 2025, and most of the broadcasts fall on a Sunday, between eight and nine in the morning⁷. A still larger part of the channel is read akathists and prayers, arranged in separate collections⁷.