Holy Trinity Convent

The Holy Trinity Convent in Simferopol, a house of the Simferopol Diocese of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, grew up around the Holy Trinity cathedral that the city's Greek community built^{1, 2}.

Simferopol was founded in 1784 beside the Tatar settlement of Ak-Mechet, and the city's name itself was proposed the following year by Yevhenii (Bulgaris), Archbishop of Sloviansk and Kherson, who then had charge of church affairs in Crimea; besides Russians and Tatars, Greeks also settled here². They built their wooden parish church in honour of the Holy Trinity in 1796, and in 1868 replaced it with one of stone^{1, 2}. From 1826 a Greek gymnasium was housed at the Holy Trinity church³.

The stone church was raised to the design of the architect I. F. Kolodin: cruciform in plan, with an eight-sided lantern drum in the middle and a low bell tower over the entrance, its walls adorned on the outside with patterning, slender pilasters with Corinthian capitals and mosaic images^{1, 3, 4}. Before the revolution of 1917 the main dome was crowned by a finial, which was taken down later⁴. The side chapels were consecrated in memory of All the Saints of Crimea, the southern one, and of the holy equals-to-the-apostles Constantine and Helen, the northern one^{1, 4}.

The western corner of the monastery grounds was occupied by the Greek trading rows, several columns under a tiled roof, an architectural monument of the eighteenth century^{1, 3, 4}. The street beside which the house arose was called the Greek street from about 1839 until 1946^{1, 3}.

After the destruction of the Alexander Nevsky cathedral in Simferopol at the beginning of the 1930s, and the closure in 1934 of the cathedral of the apostles Peter and Paul, cathedral status passed to the Holy Trinity church^{1, 2}. As early as 1933 the authorities had resolved to close the church and hand the building over for a boarding school, and the conversion work had already begun, but the parishioners, most of them Greek subjects, obtained the building's return to the community in 1934 with the help of diplomats and through the Greek mission in Moscow^{1, 2}.

In the middle of the 1930s Porfyrii (Hulevych, 1864-1937), Bishop of Simferopol and Crimea, and archpriest Mykola Mezentsev (1863-1938) laboured in prayer at the Holy Trinity church, and the layman Dymytrii Spyrydonov, who died in 1938, was an active member of the church community^{1, 2, 3}. Bishop Porfyrii and archpriest Mykola were shot³; all three were later numbered among the New Martyrs of Crimea^{1, 2}. At the end of the 1930s the church was closed again, and in 1941 worship in it was resumed².

In 1946-1961 the diocese was headed by Luka (Voino-Yasenetskyi, 1877-1961), Archbishop of Simferopol and Crimea, who served in the cathedral². A gifted surgeon, he deliberately became a priest and a bishop at the very beginning of the persecution of the Church, and for that passed through many years of prisons, camps and exile, while during the war, still in exile, he operated on the wounded².

In 1995 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church resolved to number Saint Luka among the locally venerated saints of the Crimean diocese². In 1996 his relics were found at the city cemetery beside the church of All Saints and transferred to the Holy Trinity cathedral². In 2001 they were laid in a silver reliquary sent as a gift by Orthodox Greeks in gratitude for healings from grave illnesses^{1, 2, 5}.

The peninsula was once overshadowed by an icon of the Mother of God called the Bakhchysarai, the Mariupol, the Hodegetria, the Panagia; in 1778, when the Greek Christians resettled to the Azov region, the icon went with them and remained in Mariupol until it disappeared during the war⁶.

In 1998 a laywoman, Feodosiia Denysenko, a parishioner of the church of St John the Baptist in the village of Pervomaiske in the Kirovske raion, donated to the church an icon of the Mother of God, a dim, dark, barely distinguishable image on a small board without a riza, and the rector, archpriest Oleksandr Kozak, placed it in the sanctuary^{5, 6}. Two weeks later, during a festal service, through the open Royal Doors its former owner saw her gift and did not recognise it, so bright had the image become; to her questions the priest answered that he had not touched the image^{5, 6}.

A report was submitted to the ruling hierarch, and Lazar, Archbishop of Simferopol and Crimea, blessed the forming of a commission of clergy and laity, of artists, scholars and local historians⁶. The commission unanimously found that the icon had renewed itself^{5, 6}. By that same description the image was small, 20 by 16 centimetres, on wood, of provincial painting presumably of the Kyiv school, of the early twentieth century, and no analogue of it was known⁶.

Soon afterwards the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church blessed the church veneration of this icon^{5, 6}, and in 1999 the renewed image was carried in procession around the whole peninsula⁶.

On 27 December 2002, by decision of the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the Holy Trinity cathedral was turned into a convent, and cathedral status passed temporarily to the church of the apostles Peter and Paul². The house's own account dates the founding of the convent at the Holy Trinity church to 2003¹.

In 2003 a museum of Saint Luka was opened in the building of the former diocesan administration that stood beside the church^{2, 4}. At the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a small baptistery church of the holy prophet Elijah was built south of the cathedral, where the first baptism was performed in 2005, and the north-eastern side of the grounds was taken up by a multi-storey guest house and service building⁴.

On 13 May 2011 the convent's hierarchal choir came to Dnipropetrovsk, with the blessing of the ruling hierarch, for the eighth All-Ukrainian festival of Paschal chant, and on 15 May it received a first-degree laureate's diploma in the category of best parish church choir⁷.