"Gorecha" Nativity of the Most Holy Mother of God Monastery

The oldest stone church in Chernivtsi stands at Horecha, a former village that in time was taken into the city¹. The monastery here was founded in 1712 by Antonii, bishop of Rădăuți, in the suburb above the Prut³; in 1730 a wooden church was built in the house³. The first hegumen was the hieromonk Ioannykii, and his successor, hegumen Artemon (Kinitsky), raised in 1765-1767 the stone baroque church of the Nativity of the Mother of God with a chapel of St George, at the expense of the Moldavian Metropolitan Gavriil and the logofet Chilibiu³.

The church was built with defence in mind: walls about a metre and eighty centimetres thick, and a combat passage with loopholes around the roof perimeter⁴; a fighting gallery was arranged on the second tier¹. The lines of the side walls and the placing of the domes are asymmetrical: among the seven domes of differing height there are large ones with light windows and small decorative ones¹. Besides the main altar the church has chapels of the Great Martyrs George the Victorious and Barbara, with cells in the upper part of the building¹. In the interior eighteenth-century frescoes have survived¹, among them a Last Judgment over the entrance, and a rich baroque iconostasis⁴. A separate wooden belfry was put up at the same time as the church¹.

Until 1774 Chernivtsi paid a tithe to the monastery at Horecha⁵. In 1783 Emperor Joseph II ordered the house closed and its church turned into a parish one⁵; by the closure of 1784 there were about twenty monks in the monastery³. In that same year 1784 the monks took all the charters, church vessels and banners and left for Moldavia, and an imperial decree returned to the town thirty-one hectares of land - the village of Horecha - which the monastery had taken in 1764⁵.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the house was visited by the Russian Emperor Alexander I¹. Local history gives this as a tradition and dates it to October 1823, when a meeting of two emperors took place in Chernivtsi: what popular memory kept was an account of the monarch walking out to Horecha to the former monastery church, where he was set upon by dogs⁵.

The monastery was restored in 1995^{1, 3}. In 1999-2000 two brotherhood buildings were raised here¹. As of 2006, when the relevant volume of the encyclopaedia appeared, twelve brethren lived in the house³. Today the monastery belongs to the Chernivtsi and Bukovyna eparchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and stands on Troianivska Street².