Holy Trinity stauropegial Convent

The Holy Trinity stauropegial Convent stands in the town of Nemyriv in the Vinnytsia region. Until 1996 the house was called the Convent of St Nicholas, and it took its present name from the only church that survived on its grounds^{1, 2}.

The sources tell the beginning of the house differently. The encyclopaedia places the foundation at roughly the middle of the eighteenth century and connects it with Count Vincent Potocki (1740-1825), a statesman and military commander of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; at first the monastery was a men's house and stood, probably, in the village of Monastyrske or at the tract of Monastyrok near Nemyriv². The house's own page names the same two places, assigning the tract to the village of Selevyntsi, and dates the references to a monastery in Nemyriv itself to the second half of the eighteenth century¹.

The Synodal Information and Education Department of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, in a report of 2017, gives a different account: the house was founded by the venerable Methodius, who came from Athos as early as the first half of the thirteenth century, was twice destroyed by the Tatars and twice revived, and a third time life in the monastery resumed in independent Ukraine³.

In 1783 the monastery was turned into a women's house dedicated to St Nicholas and moved onto the grounds of Count Potocki's palace at Nemyriv. According to a tradition recorded by the encyclopaedia, St Nicholas appeared in a dream to Potocki, a Catholic, and commanded him to vacate the palace for an Orthodox house, but the landowner ignored the vision; only after a third appearance, when the count was miraculously carried out of the house on his bed into the courtyard, did he submit². In 1797 Potocki formally confirmed his permission for the nuns to remain there and made the monastery a gift of land^{1, 2}.

On 14 October 1798, at the petition of Bishop Ioannykii (Nykyforovych-Polonskyi) of Bratslav and Podillia, a decision of the Synod raised the house to the second class, and its upkeep was provided from the state treasury; in 1841 the monastery was moved to the third class. Under the superior Yennafa, who governed from 1800 to 1837, a stone Dormition church was built here (about 1809), together with new wooden cells and outbuildings².

In the first half of 1845, already under Abbess Apollinaria (Balushyna, 1818-1903), who headed the house from 1845 to 1903, a fire destroyed all the wooden buildings - the cells and the outbuildings; the superior's house and the Dormition church survived².

In the same year a stone church of the same dedication was raised on the site of the burnt wooden church of St Nicholas, and a northern aisle was added to it in 1862 and a southern one in 1894. Shortly afterwards there appeared a single-storey stone cell block with a gallery of short columns of the Tuscan order, a refectory and a priest's house².

Before Apollinaria the monastery kept the idiorrhythmic rule: each nun, and sometimes two or three, built at her own cost a house in which she lived and kept a separate household. In 1846, on the representation of the dean of monasteries Hegumen Hedeon and with the blessing of Archbishop Arsenii (Moskvin) of Podillia and Bratslav, the cenobitic rule was introduced in the house².

Between 1846 and 1865 the monastery was enclosed by a brick wall more than a kilometre long and more than three metres high, with four corner towers. In the same years there appeared a stone wing for the nuns (1853), a kitchen with quarters for workmen, a refectory building with a kitchen and a bakery (1867), and a three-tier bell tower (1873)².

Between 1876 and 1881, with the blessing of Bishop Feohnost (Lebedev) of Podillia and Bratslav, the Holy Trinity cathedral was raised in the house, and between 1888 and 1889 one more, small bell tower was put up, in memory of the escape of the family of Emperor Alexander III in the train crash of 17 October 1888 at Borky station; a bell was cast for it in memory of the same event^{2, 4}. The building was done in good-quality brick made at the monastery's own brickworks².

By the middle of the nineteenth century the house held the 37 dessiatines of land given by Potocki. In 1865 the monastery was allotted a further 125 dessiatines from the treasury near the village of Ksendzivka, and on a petition of 1893 it was granted 88 dessiatines of woodland in the same place and given a mill there; in the same year, at the request of Abbess Apollinaria, the house was granted a further 153 dessiatines of land near the village of Buhakiv. Unable to work all of it themselves, the sisters leased out the land and the mill².

On 1 October 1860 Abbess Apollinaria restored at the monastery a church school for orphan girls and for the daughters of the poor clergy and church servants of the eparchy; the nuns of the house taught in it. In 1884 the Nemyriv monastery school was reorganised into a parish school, with history and geography added to its programme. Among the teachers here was the priest Dymytrii Leontovych, father of the composer and conductor Mykola Leontovych (1877-1921), whom he taught to play the cello, the violin and the guitar².

The sisters kept a gold-embroidery workshop, where they made furnishings for churches and sewed priestly vestments for cathedrals and for bishops' sacristies. In the Dormition church there was kept an icon of the Mother of God with the Eternal Child, shown on one canvas with St Nicholas, which came through the fire of 1845; over the royal doors of the Holy Trinity church stood the Kazan icon of the Mother of God, and on the high place of the Dormition church an image of the Dormition (1846-1847) by the artist Ivan Soshenko².

The house also venerated icons of St Sergius of Radonezh and of the right-believing prince Alexander Nevsky, which had earlier been in St Isaac's cathedral in St Petersburg and were given to the monastery at the abbess's request. In 1910 monks from Athos gave the house the icon of the Mother of God known as the Three-Handed, which later came to be in the convent at Brailiv².

In 1895 about 30 nuns and 50 novices lived in the house, and by 1906 the abbess, 29 nuns and 88 novices. After the outbreak of the First World War, with the blessing of Bishop Mytrofan (Afonskyi) of Podillia and Bratslav, a Podillia temporary eparchial committee for aid to wounded and sick soldiers was set up; by its order an infirmary was opened at the monastery by January 1915, and the sisters of the house served as nurses².

In 1922, on the pretext of a shortage of money to buy grain, the authorities removed from the house all its church valuables and its bells, along with more than 300 dessiatines of land. By the end of 1929 the executive bodies took a decision to close the monastery: most of the nuns moved to the convent at Brailiv, some to a home for the disabled, and the rest settled with relatives^{1, 2}.

The churches and several of the buildings were handed to a military unit, in 1930 the Nemyriv machine and tractor station was placed on the grounds of the house, and an orphanage occupied the remaining buildings. In the autumn of 1941 the orphanage was evacuated, about 55 sisters returned to the monastery, and services were held in a chapel fitted out inside one of the buildings².

After the liberation of Nemyriv the monastery buildings housed an orphanage, a school for the deaf and mute and a school for agronomists. The nuns lived on in the blocks of the house until May 1951, when they were again moved out to Brailiv, and on 20 March 1958 the executive committee of the Nemyriv district council resolved to dismantle the winter Dormition church as unsafe².

At the beginning of the 1990s the rector of the church of St Nicholas in the settlement of Bratslav and dean of the Nemyriv district, Archpriest Mykola Chornopyshchuk, gathered a parish community and obtained permission to restore the monastery's Holy Trinity church. On 19 August 1992, the feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord, he served the Divine Liturgy in it for the first time in many years, and on 7 March 1996 a decision of the Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church revived the house and renamed it in honour of the Holy Trinity^{1, 2}.

By 1998 a well had been dug beside the church, and a chapel and a bell tower raised over it^{2, 4}. On 9 February 2006 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, having considered the state of affairs in the monastery, which then belonged to the Tulchyn eparchy, granted it stauropegial status in direct subordination to the Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine⁵. On 18 May of the same year Metropolitan Volodymyr (Sabodan) of Kyiv and All Ukraine performed the rite of the consecration of the crosses for the second church built in the house⁴, and on 20 July 2012 the Synod blessed the opening of a skete of the house in the town of Ladyzhyn in the Vinnytsia region⁶.

The cells of 1845 and the Holy Trinity church of 1881 of the former monastery of St Nicholas are entered on the list of architectural monuments of Nemyriv of local significance⁷.

The monastery holds 7 hectares of land worked by the sisters, and has a subsidiary farm and a workshop where priestly and church vestments are sewn. A Sunday school for adults and children, a library and a kiosk selling church literature are run at the house, and several particles of the relics of saints are kept there².

Among the relics of the house is a copy of the image of the Mother of God with St Nicholas, which before the revolution was in the monastery's Dormition church⁸. A museum of the history of the house is open in one of its rooms¹, and in 2007 a museum was set up in Nemyriv itself about the establishment of Orthodoxy in the Nemyriv region and about the founding of the monastery².