St. Theodosius of Chernigov's stauropegial male metochion

The stauropegial male metochion of the Holy Dormition Sviatohirsk Lavra in honour of St. Theodosius of Chernihiv was opened in the village of Karmazynivka, Svativ raion, in the Luhansk region, about 75 kilometres from Sviatohirsk^{1, 2}.

The masonry church in the village appeared long before the metochion. The Lavra calls it the church of Saints Nicholas and Theodosius and dates it to 1887², and the Svatove press gave the same year³; the chronicle of the Donetsk eparchy assigns the church — the church of St. Nicholas with a side altar of St. Theodosius of Chernihiv — to 1870⁵.

The church had three altars³. A description that appeared on the Svatove town site while the church was still not the Lavra's noted that the name of the third patron was unknown, that nobody knew the church's reliable history, and that the building was thought to be about a hundred and fifty years old⁴.

The same description carried a tradition that the church had been raised by Old Believers of the Edinoverie communion who lived in Karmazynivka, Kovalivka and the surrounding villages and who in time joined the Orthodox Church; its own author doubted that so strong an Old Believer community, able to build such a church, could have existed in those parts, and inclined to the view that the church was raised by the Orthodox while the Edinoverie community assisted in it and later entered the parish⁴.

By the same description, connoisseurs held the church's architectural solution to be an exceptional rarity in Ukraine, frescoes by an unknown hand covered it within and without, and the parish's church books were kept in the Svatove district registry of civil acts⁴.

From 1957 the church was used as a grain store². The head of the local village council recalled the year 1973, when she came to the Svatove country: everything was in ruins, the windows were broken, and trees had grown on the roof of the church³.

In 1994 the community resolved to restore the three-altar church³, and from that time services began to be held in it again². People gave money and looked for benefactors, and the greatest help came from a native of the village who was then living in Kyiv³; there was still not enough for a restoration, and the work stopped^{2, 4}.

On 20 December 2008 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, having heard the reports of Metropolitan Ilarion of Donetsk and Mariupol and Bishop Ahapit of Sievierodonetsk and Starobilsk, blessed the opening of a metochion of the Holy Dormition Sviatohirsk Lavra in honour of St. Theodosius of Chernihiv in the village of Karmazynivka in the Luhansk region; the act was recorded as Journal No. 141¹. The chronicle of the Donetsk eparchy gives the same decision as the opening of a skete of the Lavra in the name of Saints Nicholas and Theodosius⁵.

At the time of the transfer to the Lavra the church was in a distressing state². The first repair work was carried out by the brethren of the Sviatohirsk Lavra on 8 September 2008²; by the newspaper's account, the monks carried four lorryloads of rubbish out of the church by hand³. The repair took two years².

In 2010 the consecration of the church and the raising of its bells took place². Eleven bells were brought; the heaviest weighed 1,610 kilograms and the smallest was a miniature one, and when they were raised and first rang the sound was heard in neighbouring Raihorodka³.

After the restoration the painting of the church and the ordering of the ground around it were begun, and several buildings and the gates of the future Lavra skete were put up beside the church².