Transfiguration Convent

By local tradition the monastery was founded by hermit monks who settled here in dugouts¹. Under the year 1540 the house is first mentioned in historical documents¹; the eparchy dates the appearance of the shrine on the bank of the Southern Buh to the sixteenth century⁶. Because it stood close to Medzhybizh the monastery was often called the Medzhybizh one¹. In the eighteenth century it became Uniate, and in 1795 it was returned to the Orthodox¹. At the end of the eighteenth century the house burned down and the wooden Transfiguration church, known from 1760, perished; in 1809 a stone church of the same dedication was built in its place¹.

In 1820 the monastery was visited by the Russian Emperor Alexander I. The historian Yevfymii Sitsinsky notes: "The visit was accidental. The emperor, going through the superior's rooms, saw a human skull in the cell, wished to take it with him, and left the superior 100 roubles in its place"¹. In 1849 a heated church of St Nicholas of Myra was consecrated in the middle tier of the stone gate belfry¹. In 1888 the house was turned into a convent¹. In memory of Alexander III's escape in the railway disaster of that same year 1888, a new refectory church with two altars - of the Dormition of the Mother of God and of Sts Mytrofan of Voronezh and Tykhon of Zadonsk - was built in the monastery and consecrated in 1893¹.

In 1922-1924 the house was closed and given over to a children's home, and the belfry was afterwards taken down¹. Some of the monastics remained here until 1935, and a month before they were driven out, in the building known as the "priest's house", the infant Viktor Sabodan from the neighbouring village of Markivtsi was baptised - the future Primate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, His Beatitude Metropolitan Volodymyr of Kyiv and All Ukraine^{1, 6}. In 1941 the sisters returned to the house, but in 1944 it was closed again¹. In that same year a shell destroyed what was left of the St Nicholas church, and a grave of fallen Soviet soldiers appeared on the monastery grounds¹. After the war a special children's boarding school was placed here, which put up a number of new buildings in the 1980s¹; among the monasteries closed in the Khmelnytskyi region by 1964 the eparchy names the Holovchyntsi one as well⁶.

In 1996 the house was revived^{1, 6}. On 12 March 1998 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, by its journal no. 13, blessed the transformation of the Transfiguration convent at Holovchyntsi into a monastery for men⁷; and on 22 January 2001, opening the convent of St Anna the Righteous at Slavuta, the Synod appointed as its senior sister a nun of the "Transfiguration convent of Holovchyntsi"⁸. On 5 January 2013 the Synod, by its journal no. 07 and on the report of Metropolitan Antonii of Khmelnytskyi and Starokostiantyniv, blessed the opening of the St Michael skete of the Holovchyntsi Transfiguration convent in the village of Markivtsi⁹ - the same village where the future Metropolitan Volodymyr was born, served in the church from the age of seven, and where his parents are buried⁴.

The revived house was built up over two decades: in 2002 the house church of St Onuphrius the Great was consecrated and the Transfiguration church renewed, in 2003-2009 a chapel and a bathing place were built at St Onuphrius' spring, in 2004 the Soviet monument on the soldiers' grave was replaced by a cross, in 2007 the new superior's building was consecrated, in 2008-2009 a church of the Holy Trinity was arranged, and in 2009 the belfry was finished and an Orthodox summer camp for children, "Rodnychok", was opened at the monastery¹. Among the holy objects of the house are an old icon of St Onuphrius the Great and a Crucifix made in 1908 at the St Elijah skete on Athos; while the monastery was closed these were kept in the church of the Apostle John the Theologian in the village of Trebukhivtsi². The icon and the spring of St Onuphrius are named by the eparchy among its venerated shrines⁶. The patronal feasts of the monastery are the Day of the Holy Trinity, the Transfiguration of the Lord on 6 (19) August and the memory of St Onuphrius the Great on 12 (25) June³; the Khmelnytskyi eparchy keeps the house on its list of monasteries⁵.