St. George's stauropegial male skete

St. George's male skete of the Sviatohirsk Lavra stands in the village of Dolyna in the Donetsk region, thirty kilometres north-east of Sloviansk⁷. Until 1945 the village was called Hola Dolyna⁷.

The chronicle of the Sviatohirsk house quotes the diary of Johann Anton Güldenstädt, academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, who visited the monastery in 1774: from the station of Hola Dolyna he rode nine versts almost due east along the southern edge of the Teplynskyi forest to the Sviatohirsk monastery⁴.

The same chronicle records that Engelhardt's Sviatohirsk estate consisted of eight settlements with 4,157 inhabitants, and that in 1797 the village of Hola Dolyna and the khutir of Nitriuzkyi were entered into it³.

A wooden parish church of the Holy Great Martyr George the Victorious was raised at Hola Dolyna in 1862 at the expense of Potiomkin¹.

In 1867 Archimandrite Herman, having taken counsel with the brethren, decided to open a people's school here for forty boys; in time the school was turned into a church-parish school kept at the expense of the Sviatohirsk hermitage¹.

In 1903 the classes numbered 150 pupils, and the school also had a hostel for twenty orphan boys; its teacher was appointed from among the Sviatohirsk brethren¹.

The school at Hola Dolyna was not the only one: according to the chronicle of the house, in the surrounding villages - Hola Dolyna, Banne and Pryshyb - the Sviatohirsk monks set up schools where they taught literacy, church singing, applied art and other subjects, and the pupils in them numbered more than three hundred².

On 6 May 2005 the church of the Great Martyr George the Victorious was laid in the Lavra's skete at Dolyna⁵. The model for the skete church, as the Lavra's page has it, was the church of the Protection of the Mother of God on the Nerl in its original form¹.

On 24 January 2006 the first divine service was held in the school church in honour of George the Victorious at Dolyna⁵.

On 24 September 2010 His Beatitude Metropolitan Volodymyr (Sabodan), travelling from the Sviatohirsk Lavra to the town of Izium in the Kharkiv region, visited St. George's skete at Dolyna¹. The pupils of the local school met the Primate with bread and salt, and the members of the local folk choir sang him the Many Years¹.

In December 2013 the eparchial publication made public the Lavra's building plans: according to the house's secretary, its brethren were then building five monastic complexes, and among the designs just presented were the church of the Great Martyr George the Victorious at Dolyna, still going up at the time, and the design of the holy gates, the belfry and the brothers' block of St. George's skete⁶.