Matrona's Holy Trinity Convent

The Holy Trinity convent at Melnyky stands in the relict Motronyn forest of Kholodnyi Yar, 4 kilometres west of the village, in the Cherkasy region, inside the ramparts of a Scythian hillfort of the sixth to fourth centuries BC^{1, 2, 6}.

Popular tradition ascribes the founding of the house to a princess named Matrona and places her life before the Mongol invasion, while the monastery's own manuscripts hold that it already existed in the twelfth-thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries³. The documented history is shorter: according to the encyclopaedias the house was founded, or renewed, as a men's monastery, probably in the second half of the sixteenth century, with the blessing of Metropolitan Iona (Protasevych) of Kyiv². In 1620 and 1621 Hetman Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachnyi issued charters taking the monastery under his protection². In 1648 Metropolitan Sylvestr (Kosiv) granted the house an antimension, and from then on its heads began to be styled hegumens².

During the Turkish campaigns against Chyhyryn in 1677-1678 the monastery was, in the source's own careful wording, probably destroyed entirely². From 1685, with the blessing of Metropolitan Hedeon (Sviatopolk-Chetvertynskyi) of Kyiv, it began to be revived². Wooden Trinity churches were consecrated in 1620-1621, 1685 and 1727, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century a masonry Trinity church rose, today an architectural monument of national significance². The sources differ on its dates: the house itself puts the building at 1800-1804, the encyclopaedia gives 1805^{3, 2}.

From 1717 to 1753 the standing of the monastery was strengthened by Hegumen Ihnatii (Sakhnenko), and from 1753 to 1768 the house was headed by Melkhisedek (Znachko-Yavorskyi)². He was born in 1720 into the family of a Lubny esaul, studied at the Kyiv Academy, was tonsured here in 1745, and in 1753 became hegumen of this house³. In the middle of the eighteenth century the Kholodnyi Yar tract became a centre of the haidamaka movement: Maksym Zalizniak, one of the leaders of the Koliivshchyna, was a novice of the monastery from 1767^{2, 3}. At the end of the nineteenth century portraits of M. I. Zalizniak and I. Honta still hung beside the icons in the Trinity church¹.

In 1843 and in 1845 Taras Shevchenko stayed at the house, painting here the watercolour "Motryn Monastery" and drawing the monastery's semantron³. The events of the Koliivshchyna inspired his poem "Haidamaky"³.

From 1911 the monastery began to operate as a women's house^{1, 3}. In 1921 about 250 desiatynas of its land were confiscated¹. By a decree of the secretariat of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee of 21 November 1929 the house was finally liquidated, its religious community dispersed, and all its property and buildings handed to the "Zapovit Lenina" agricultural commune in the village of Melnyky¹. In 1943 almost all the monastery's buildings were destroyed and the one surviving masonry Trinity church was damaged³.

The revival of the house began in 1991; in the course of the new building a masonry block of distinctive architecture, with turrets at its corners, was put up³. Among the monastery's holy objects is a venerated icon of St Matrona of Constantinople, commemorated on 9 / 22 November⁵. In December 2021 Ukraine's first women's volunteer fire brigade was opened at the house; it is made up of the monastery's own sisters and serves the residents of 9 nearby villages⁷. The convent's patronal feast is the Day of the Holy Trinity⁴.