"Joy of All Who Sorrows" Icon of the Mother of God stauropegial female skete

The skete of the "Joy of All Who Sorrows" Icon of the Mother of God is a women's house of the Sviatohirsk Lavra in the village of Bohorodychne in the Donetsk region. The village lies picturesquely in a hollow among chalk hills not far from the Sviatohirsk monastery, upstream of it along the Donets, among the Holy Mountains that rise along the river bank¹.

The neighbourhood of Bohorodychne is rich in archaeological sites: in the surroundings of the village researchers have identified traces of ancient settlements of various epochs and cultures, and in the territory of the Holy Mountains archaeologists have found five hillforts of the Khazar khaganate of the Saltiv-Maiaky archaeological culture of the eighth to tenth centuries, two of which, the Teplynske and the Sviatohirske, lie in the immediate vicinity of the village. Through what is now Bohorodychne there ran, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ambassadorial road from Tsareborysiv with a crossing over the Siverskyi Donets towards Mlynkova hill¹.

Folk tradition has preserved the account that the icon of the Mother of God "Joy of All Who Sorrows" was miraculously found at the beginning of the eighteenth century on the surface of the water of one of the village wells; from that time the settlement that arose here came to be called Bohorodychne¹. The Donetsk eparchy relates the same local memory².

In 1847 a stone church in honour of the image of the Mother of God "Joy of All Who Sorrows" was built in the village at the expense of the actual privy councillor Oleksandr Mykhailovych Potemkin¹. According to the eparchy, in the middle of the nineteenth century the church belonged to the holdings of the monastery's khutir².

The "Reference Book for the Kharkiv Eparchy", published by I. Samoilovych in 1904, gives the following information about this church: about three desiatynas of homestead land and thirty-three of arable and hay land; 1,528 male parishioners and 1,312 female; the establishment provided for a priest, a deacon and a psalm-reader; and a zemstvo school, a Sunday school and two parish schools were attached to the church¹. According to the same book published four years later, in 1908, there were by then 2,208 male and 2,052 female parishioners¹.

Three generations of the Fedorov family served in the Bohorodychne church from its very foundation until its closure¹. The first known priest was Father Ivan Ivanovych Fedorov; after him the priest Meletii Beliaiev served in the church for a time, and, as is clear from documents of 1902, he also held the post of head and teacher of religion of the parish school of the hamlet of Pryshyb¹.

Father Ivan's son Vasyl followed his father's clerical path: in 1859, having finished the seminary in the second class, he was ordained priest at the age of nineteen. After more than forty years of service in various parishes of the Kharkiv eparchy he was appointed in 1903 to his father's place in his native village, where, however, he served only two years and handed the place on to his son, the priest Ioann¹.

Father Vasyl was married to Feodosiia Mykhailivna Titova, a graduate of the women's eparchial school and the daughter of a Kharkiv priest, by whom he had five sons: Ivan, Pavlo, Kostiantyn, Mytrofan and Vasyl. Ivan, born in 1865, finished the seminary in the second class and was ordained priest¹.

Father Vasyl's youngest son, also Vasyl, finished the theological seminary, took teachers' courses and was appointed to the zemstvo school of the village of Bohorodychne, where he worked for fifteen years. In 1914 he was mobilised into the army; as he recalled later, a small image of the Mother of God was always with him, and he was certain that she alone had delivered him from the misfortunes of war. After returning from the war he was ordained in Kharkiv and received a parish at Novyi Merchyk, but soon came back to Bohorodychne and served in the church here¹.

Under Soviet rule the Sviatohirsk house was closed first, and then the church in Bohorodychne; the village, however, kept its name¹. As local residents testify, after its closure the church was used for a time to store grain, and in 1938–39 it was dismantled almost to its footings; in the church house beside it a village club was set up¹.

A new club was begun out of the church's bricks, but the building was never finished, for the war began, and it destroyed what had not been pulled down. The bursting of bombs and shells also almost completely destroyed the old village cemetery that lay beside the church¹.

The only thing to survive was the well-spring in which the icon had once been found, and people went on calling its water holy. Local residents testify that during the war carts came often to the spring from the field hospitals for water for the wounded. In the post-war years the spring disappeared: by the account of some old residents it was destroyed during the clearing of mines, by the account of others during the building of a road¹.

In 1943, at the liberation of the Holy Mountains, almost the whole local population was driven from its homes by the Germans and marched to the Dnipropetrovsk region, to the village of Yuriivka; Father Vasyl went with the villagers. He returned to Bohorodychne only at the end of his life, died on 25 October 1958 and was buried in the farthest corner of the village cemetery¹.

The church in Bohorodychne grew up beside an ancient monastic house and was destroyed after that house was closed, and it began to be revived when the Sviatohirsk house came through its third rebirth¹. On 5 June 1997 the Sviatohirsk monks held the first divine service in Bohorodychne, and on 20 June 2000 the foundation of a church was laid through the efforts of the superior of the Sviatohirsk monastery¹.

The Sviatohirsk house, the Lunov brothers, local benefactors and ordinary villagers all took part in the building, and the greater part of the labour was taken on by the Lunovs¹. The Donetsk eparchy names Serhii Heorhiiovych Lunov as the skete's ktitor, by whose labours the church in Bohorodychne was restored; in 2013 a short lity was served for him in the church². In five years a white and blue church with five domes rose on a high hill in the middle of the village¹.

The iconostasis of the upper church was made of green Indian marble combined with gilded openwork carving to the design of I. Antonov and S. Lunov¹. The design of the lower church's iconostasis was drawn up by Ihor Antonov, a native of the Sviatohirsk country, and the carving to his design was executed by the carvers of Khotkovo⁴.

The principal icons and frescoes of the church were painted by the artist and icon painter Oleksandr Ivanovych Chashkin, under whose direction two teams of painters worked^{1, 4}. Within and without the church was adorned with mosaic compositions by Oleksandr Kornoukhov and Tetiana Babushkina; the mosaic image of the Mother of God on the altar apse outside was made by Tetiana Babushkina^{1, 4}.

Throughout the building the Sviatohirsk brethren came to the village to celebrate the feast-day services: they served first in a large tent, then among bare brick walls, and when the ceiling of the first storey appeared it was decided, with the superior's blessing, to arrange a church in it in honour of Saint Sergius of Radonezh, and so the village received one more heavenly patron¹.

On 16 July 2002 the superior consecrated ten bells cast in Moscow, and they were raised to the church's belfry¹. The largest, weighing 1.3 tonnes, bears the image of the icon "Joy of All Who Sorrows" and a commemorative inscription that it was cast at the expense of the ktitors; the second largest bears Saint Sergius of Radonezh, the third Saints Cyril and Maria, the parents of Saint Sergius, and the fourth the holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Prince Volodymyr¹. On that day Bohorodychne heard the first church bells after a long silence¹.

On 14 February 2005, with the blessing of Metropolitan Ilarion of Donetsk and Mariupol, Bishop Alypii together with the superior of the Sviatohirsk Lavra consecrated the church in honour of the icon of the Mother of God "Joy of All Who Sorrows": the upper church was consecrated by Bishop Alypii, concelebrating with the Lavra's brethren and the parish clergy, and the lower one, in honour of Saint Sergius of Radonezh, by the superior with the Lavra's clergy¹.

Beneath the altars of the newly consecrated church, in silver reliquaries, were laid the relics of Saint John the Recluse of Sviatohirsk, of Saint Sergius abbot of Radonezh, and of the holy Martyrs of Bethlehem¹.

Almost immediately after the consecration, with the blessing of Metropolitan Ilarion and the consent of the benefactors, the church "Joy of All Who Sorrows" together with its dependency was transformed into the Bohorodychnyi women's skete of the Sviatohirsk Lavra, so that the history of the building and consecration of a church became the history of the founding of a new monastic house^{1, 2}. For the sisters a three-storey stone block holding cells and a refectory was built beside the church¹.

The first sister of the future house was the nun Lavrentiia, who settled here while the church was still being built and later took the great schema here under the name Liubov¹. In May 2006 the first monastic tonsure took place in the young house, and in December of the same year it was officially granted the status of a skete of the Sviatohirsk Lavra¹.

Not far from the place where the miraculous spring had been, a new one was arranged, and over it a chapel was built in honour of the holy right-believing Grand Prince Alexander Nevsky; on 12 September 2005 it was consecrated by the superior of the Sviatohirsk Lavra¹. The chapel was painted in 2007 by a group of icon painters under the direction of A. Yablochkin, and inside it was set a marble bowl with a cross from which flowed water raised from a depth of thirty metres¹.

In November 2008 an old icon of the Mother of God "Joy of All Who Sorrows" returned to the restored church; in 1909 the parishioners had given it to the church elder Nazarii Yosypovych Budniak for his zealous service and for the building of a new iconostasis, as an inscription at the foot of the icon testifies¹.

The icon shows symbolically the village of Bohorodychne, the former church and, below, the miraculous spring and the parish school; the Lavra's own account draws attention to the fact that the Mother of God stands on the very spot where the new church was built in the twenty-first century¹. From 2010, with the blessing of Archbishop Arsenii, a Sunday school for children operated at the house⁵.

Since on the patronal days the church could not hold all the worshippers within its walls, a larger and more capacious two-storey church was begun on the skete's grounds: the upper one in honour of the Annunciation of the Most Holy Mother of God, the lower in honour of the holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Grand Prince Volodymyr¹. The beginning of this work was laid on 29 October 2009, when the superior of the Sviatohirsk Lavra served a moleben before the building¹. On 10 July 2010 a metal wayside cross 3.5 metres high, set up at the entrance to the village, was consecrated¹.

On 14 June 2013 Archbishop Arsenii consecrated at the skete eleven bells for the Annunciation cathedral church then being built, made at the bell-casting works of a Donetsk metallurgical plant; the largest weighed 3.6 tonnes¹. On 15 August 2013 he consecrated the crosses for the same church, forged in the Lavra's smithy and covered with gold leaf by the Lavra's gilders; on the same day the domes and crosses were set up on the cathedral church of the Annunciation of the Most Holy Mother of God¹.

The buildings of the skete - two churches, the chapel over the holy spring, two cell-and-refectory blocks and outbuildings - were described by the heritage researcher Viktoriia Shovchko as executed in a mixed neoclassical church style with elements of the baroque: with archivolts and surrounds to the window and door openings with an accentuated keystone, with front and inter-tier cornices, pilasters of the Doric order and semicircular brow mouldings³.