All Saints' stauropegial male skete

The All Saints' Skete of the Sviatohirsk Lavra arose in the village of Tetyanivka in the Donetsk region, on the southern slopes of the Holy Mountains, on the spot where the monastery's own graveyard lay in the nineteenth century¹. The revival of the Sviatohirsk hermitage itself is bound up with that village: in 1844 the new owners of the Sviatohirsk estate, Tetyana Borysivna and Oleksandr Mykhailovych Potiomkin, whose manor stood in the immediate vicinity of the Holy Mountains at Tetyanivka, chose the first superior of the restored monastery².

The stone church in honour of All Saints was raised on a hill south of the hermitage, above the Siverskyi Donets, and consecrated in 1912 under the monastery's last superior, the venerable confessor archimandrite Tryfon (Skrypchenko)^{3, 1}. The church stood on the brethren's graveyard, and beneath it a crypt had been made ready in which Fr Tryfon wished to be buried². The heritage register explains the church's position at a distance from the monastery by the need of the hermits, who wished to hide from the eyes of the endless stream of pilgrims, and describes it as a single-nave brick sanctuary in the pseudo-Rus style with a belfry above the narthex³.

Archimandrite Tryfon (Skrypchenko) was born in 1865 in the settlement of Prorub in the Sumy district of the Kharkiv gubernia, into a peasant family; from 1890 he was a brother of the Sviatohirsk hermitage, in 1900 he went out as a regimental priest with the army to the Far East, and in 1909 the brethren elected him the fourth superior of the monastery after its revival². He died in 1939³.

In 1922 the Soviet authorities closed the Sviatohirsk monastery, and the few brethren driven out of it settled beside the All Saints' church, which was then reckoned to the Banno-Tetyanivka parish^{3, 1}. Hieromonk Mykhail (Halushko) became rector of the church and spiritual guide of the small community of monastics^{1, 4}.

The monastery chronicle quotes the newspaper Vserossiyskaya Kochegarka of 1 December 1922: up to 50 invalids and up to 100 monks were living at the monastery, the able-bodied monks were to be evicted altogether, and part of those unfit for work were to be resettled, among other places on the farmstead of Tetyanivka⁴.

The monastery's holy things were carried into the graveyard church of All Saints: the wonderworking Sviatohirsk icon of the Mother of God, the chains of Saint John the Recluse, and more than 120 particles of the relics of the saints¹. The little church became a small monastery and a place of pilgrimage for believers from the surrounding towns and villages, and until 1928 the pilgrims who arrived were bedded down for the night in the space under the church, where archimandrite Tryfon had planned to arrange a burial vault¹.

In 1926 hieromonk Ioann (Streltsov) took over as rector of the All Saints' church, probably at the time when the authorities began to persecute Fr Mykhail¹. The monastery chronicle calls Fr Ioann the successor of Fr Tryfon and Fr Mykhail in the leadership of the brethren who remained⁴. After Fr Ioann's arrest in 1931 the authorities drove out the last three monks still at the church, among them archdeacon Avraamii¹, and they left, in the register's words, with nothing but small bundles of personal things on their backs³.

In a diary entry of 16 June (old style) 1931 Fr Avraamii set down that on that day their All Saints' Banno-Tetyanivka graveyard church had been closed: on the Tuesday morning they had served the last liturgy, and by the evening of the next day the church stood empty and without crosses; the clergy were let go with their belongings and all dispersed wherever they could, having lived nine years in the field and latterly, the three of them, serving what had counted as a parish after the liquidation of the monastery^{1, 5}.

For a time there was a grain store inside the church^{1, 3}. In 1947 the church was blown up with the remains of shells, grenades and mines collected in the surrounding fields during demining^{1, 3}. The graveyard fell into desolation: the graves were desecrated and the headstones and crosses carted away^{1, 3}.

Monastic life at the Sviatohirsk monastery began to revive in 1992¹. In 2000, not far from the foundation of the demolished graveyard church, the site was cleared for the first buildings of the skete and preparations for the church were begun¹. The blessing to build was given by the elder schema-archimandrite Serafym (Mirchuk) of the village of Ozhoha, who, according to the Lavra's own account, advised that a small church be raised to one side and the great one restored, with God's help, on the old foundations¹.

On 10 June 2001, by the blessing of Metropolitan Ilarion of Donetsk and Mariupol, the superior of the monastery performed the laying of the wooden church according to the church rite¹. Into its foundation were placed a foundation stone with a commemorative inscription, and stones from several ancient churches: the church of the Saviour at Berestove in Kyiv, the Great Lavra church of the Dormition of the Mother of God at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, the Dormition cathedral of Rostov the Great and the Saviour-Transfiguration cathedral of Pereslavl-Zalessky¹.

Two years after the laying the church was built, and behind its altar the first departed brothers of the restored Sviatohirsk monastery found their last rest: the schemamonk Ioann and the novices Pavlo and Serhii¹. The Donetsk eparchy, describing the building work of those years, mentioned beside the church other log structures as well: a small house for the future dwellers of the skete, a refectory, outbuildings and a wall with corner towers⁶.

On 15 April 2002 a worship cross was raised at the crossroads by the entrance to the skete, in memory of the fact that it was here, on 4 October 1992, that the brethren of the monastery met the wonderworking Sviatohirsk icon of the Mother of God, which the clergy carried in their arms in procession from Sloviansk, returning it to the restored monastery¹.

On 20 October 2004, by the blessing of the ruling bishop, Metropolitan Ilarion (Shukalo) of Donetsk and Mariupol, the newly built church was consecrated by schema-bishop Alipiy (Pohrebniak)¹. Under the altar table were placed the relics of Saint John the Recluse, of the hieromartyr Volodymyr, Metropolitan of Kyiv, and of the martyrs of Bethlehem¹.

The model for this church was the seventeenth-century church of the Saviour from Zashiversk, a town beyond the Arctic Circle in Yakutia on the river Indigirka, which ceased to exist in the first half of the nineteenth century because of an epidemic of smallpox; that church remained the only structure surviving from ancient Zashiversk¹. In type it is an old tent-roofed building, an octagon on a quadrangle with a refectory¹.

By 2009, on the site of the All Saints' church blown up in 1947, a wooden church of the same name was raised in the traditions of the old wooden architecture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries¹. It was put together from pine logs, and its seventeen onion domes, crowned with crosses, were covered with silvery aspen shingle^{1, 3}. The churches of the skete were assembled by local carpenters and decorated with carving¹. The money came from the offerings of many believers³, and Orthodox Christians from abroad added their mite as well: part of the logs was donated by a citizen of Nigeria who supplied timber building materials in Ukraine¹.