Borysivka Transfiguration Convent

The Borysivka Transfiguration Convent of the Odesa eparchy stands in the south of the Odesa region, a few kilometres from the village of Borysivka, by a spring on the north-western shore of Lake Sasyk^{2, 5}. The eparchy puts the distance from there to Odesa at about one hundred and seventy kilometres, and to the district centre of Tatarbunary at ten⁵. The village itself was founded in 1822².

The beginning of the house is described by a typescript kept at the monastery, «История образования монастыря у с. Борисовка», which names as its founder a Borysivka peasant, Maryn Sazon¹. According to that manuscript, at the end of 1904, walking home from the monastery in the fortress of Izmail, Sazon heard a voice bidding him begin work on the land by the spring, for a monastery would stand there, and on 15 January 1905 a new sign was sent to him¹. The Odesa eparchy dates the house's chronicle from 1905 and calls Sazon not only its founder and ktitor but the chronicler of the first ten years of its making⁵.

In that same year of 1905 Sazon acquired the land he had wanted, put up a shelter on it and began to work it¹. In 1906 he set out to begin large-scale building on the plot, but his fellow villagers came out against the construction and took him to court; in 1907 they lost the suit, and building began¹.

In 1907 Sazon raised a number of wooden structures, and in 1909 the first stone block; in the years that followed new buildings appeared in the new monastery every year¹.

With the outbreak of the First World War, on the eparchy's account, only the old monks were left in the monastery, the young having gone to the front⁵. Until 1918 the house was a men's community and then became a women's one: in that year Sazon, as ktitor and manager of the monastery's household, received several nuns from Romania^{1, 5}.

Sazon went on running the household; he died here in 1923¹. His widow remained in the monastery, was tonsured in 1932 and lived there until the expulsion of the nuns by the secular authorities in 1950, and died in 1953¹.

Two sources give the war years differently. On the Odesa eparchy's account, in 1940, after more than twenty years within the Kingdom of Romania, Bessarabia was handed over to the Soviet Union: the sisters fled to Romania and a children's home was opened in the monastery⁵.

A year later, the same page writes, the sisters returned to the house accompanied by the Romanian army that had taken the Izmail region, and lived so until August 1944, when a children's home appeared on the monastery grounds again together with the Soviet troops; after two years of living side by side the children left the house⁵. The monastery's own manuscript does not mention this break at all and carries its account without interruption¹.

In 1950 the nuns were driven out of the house by the secular authorities¹. From 1950 to 1985 the monastery was occupied by a children's tuberculosis sanatorium, which the eparchy measures at thirty-five years, and from 1985 to 1991 by a narcological dispensary^{1, 5}.

On 28 May 1991 monastic life resumed in the house⁵. A novice and a nun were sent from the convent of the Nativity of the Mother of God in the village of Oleksandrivka to restore the monastery; on the eparchy's account they found ruins, and the church could be entered only through a window⁵.

Since then the old buildings have been repaired, among them the churches of the Transfiguration of the Lord and of the Protection of the Mother of God, and new ones have been raised¹. The house has a refectory for pilgrims, a hotel, a hospice for travellers and a shelter for lone homeless people¹.

The eparchy describes the monastery with golden domes on both churches, new blocks and farm buildings, a pilgrims' hotel in the Athonite manner, walks twined with roses and vines, a garden and a vineyard; cows, sheep and goats are kept on the monastery's land, and its fields are sown with maize, wheat and barley⁵. The same page calls the house the largest by area in the Odesa metropolia⁵.

On 16 May 2021, on the thirtieth anniversary of the resumption of monastic life, Metropolitan Agafangel of Odesa and Izmail performed the rite of the Great Consecration of the monastery's church of the Holy Chief Apostles Peter and Paul^{6, 7}.

Among the especially venerated holy things the eparchy names the Herbovets icon of the Mother of God and the icon of Tenderness, which stand in cases dating from the founding of the monastery, an ark with particles of the relics of the Kyiv-Pechersk and Odesa saints, and a particle of the Precious and Life-giving Cross⁵. Icons of the Great Martyr and Healer Panteleimon and of Saint Innocent, Metropolitan of Moscow, with particles of their relics were given by Metropolitan Agafangel for the centenary of the house⁵; the monastery's own site mentions besides a venerated copy of the Kazan icon of the Mother of God called the Healer⁴.

The house keeps two patronal feasts - the Transfiguration of the Lord and the Protection of the Mother of God³.