Tikhvin Convent

The idea of a monastery near Katerynoslav belonged to the peasants Yukhym Shaposhnykov and Fedir Habanenko: in 1864 they bought 201 desiatinas of land with farm buildings in the Verkhnodniprovsk uyezd and asked the bishop to set up a community there¹. Their petition to Leonid (Zaretsky), bishop of Katerynoslav and Taganrog, was submitted on 31 October of the same year³. The business dragged on, and meanwhile several citizens of Katerynoslav offered the house a suburban wooded estate of 91 desiatinas just outside the town¹. On 5 November 1865 the eparchial authorities issued a decree opening a women's community on the donated land, and on 24 September 1866 the opening of the community was confirmed by the emperor on the report of the chief procurator of the Holy Synod³.

Why the house became a Tikhvin one is told by an account the eparchial publication carries¹. Feonila (Yefremova), a nun of the Brailiv monastery travelling by way of Kyiv, took the blessing of the elder Feofil, and he told her that she would live not in Odesa but half-way to Brailiv, in a house that would become an inheritance of the Mother of God¹. On the road her seven-year-old niece fell ill, and Feonila stopped in Katerynoslav; her monastic life drew the attention of the local merchants, who conceived the idea of setting up a convent in the town¹. When the question arose of which image the house should be dedicated to, Bishop Platon blessed a three-day fast with a moleben; at the end of the fast Mariia Huseva saw in a dream a house unknown to her and in it an image of the Mother of God, before which monks were singing "Rejoice, Lady, our merciful intercessor before God", and a voice stopped her with the words: "In this image I will abide on the place where the house is founded"¹. From her description the image was long sought and was found to be in the town of Tikhvin; the envoys - the merchant Serhii Rybakov, Mariia Huseva and the nun Feonila - found in the Tikhvin monastery the very scene Mariia had seen in her sleep¹.

By government decree no. 132, issued between 28 January and 14 February 1877, the Tikhvin women's community of the Katerynoslav eparchy was renamed the Tikhvin cenobitic convent^{3, 4}. The building of the St Barbara and Tikhvin churches was completed at the end of the 1860s and the beginning of the 1870s respectively¹, and by 1887 the house was already rated a first-class cenobitic monastery⁷. The "General Illustrated Guide" of 1907 describes it a verst and a half from Katerynoslav, on high ground, enclosed by a stone wall with two towers at the corners, beyond which an oak wood runs for several versts; in the centre a five-domed church of three altars in honour of the Tikhvin icon with side chapels of the Ascension and of the Kazan icon, a small church of St Barbara and St Mary Magdalene at the entrance to the wall, and behind the monastery a guest house where pilgrims were given boiling water and hot food¹. In that year 260 nuns and novices lived in the house, and it held 725 desiatinas in two uyezds¹. A school for girls and an almshouse worked at the monastery, the latter kept up on 500 desiatinas of land given by Prince Kudashev; by the eparchial handbook of 1908, sixty girls were taught in its parish school¹. For 1903 the eparchy gives 250 nuns and 720 desiatinas, and for 1911 two priests serving in the churches of the house³.

On the eve of the closure of 1925 there were 287 sisters in the monastery: forty-nine mantle nuns, ninety-eight ryasophore nuns and more than a hundred and forty novices³. The nuns managed to save the wonderworking image - until 1942 it was kept in the flat of the nun Hennadiia³. In 1943 the house was revived; while the St Barbara church was under repair a new church of the same dedication was arranged in the former prosphora bakery, and no services were held in the burnt-out Tikhvin church¹. On 5 August 1959 the monastery was closed a second time; on the day of the closure it numbered eighty-two nuns^{3, 4}. The Tikhvin cathedral was blown up and taken apart for building material, and a boarding school for deaf and mute children was built on its site^{3, 4}.

From 1994 the life of the house began to revive - at first within the walls of the former Samara St Nicholas monastery for men at Novomoskovsk³. By a decision of the session of the Dnipropetrovsk regional council of 18 November 1997 the former monastery buildings were handed to the eparchy, and already on 17 December the first moleben in many years was served in the St Barbara church, while from 8 February 1998 Sunday liturgies began^{1, 3}. On 12 March 1998 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, having heard the report of the ruling bishop, blessed by its journal no. 10 the opening of the Tikhvin convent, and by journal no. 11 of the same session permitted the opening at the house of an eparchial school of choir directors and psalm readers³. The charter was adopted on 15 April and the monastery registered on 26 May 1998³. On 9 July 1999, after forty years, the Tikhvin icon returned to its own house³.

On 11 April 2001 the central dome was set on the St Barbara church, and on 16 April it was consecrated after a major repair^{1, 3}. In the autumn of 2001 the monastery acquired a skete in the village of Voloske, in May 2003 a second skete at Karnaukhivka was given to it, and from October 2002 a Sunday school has worked at the house³. In 2005 a methodical office of the eparchial administration was opened here, which prepares the Christian-ethics programme for general schools and trains teachers¹. The school permitted by the Synod in 1998 lived to see its first graduation: on 10 July 2024 the first graduation act took place in the school of choir directors and catechists at the Tikhvin monastery⁶. The patronal feasts of the monastery are that of the Tikhvin icon of the Mother of God on 26 June (9 July) and that of the Great Martyr Barbara on 4 (17) December²; the Dnipropetrovsk eparchy keeps the house on its list of monasteries at the same address⁵.