Gorbanеvka Icon of the Mother of God Convent

The Horbanivka Convent of the Mother of God stands in the village of Horbanivka, Poltava district, and it is the youngest of the monasteries of the Poltava eparchy³. It was founded on the spot where the Horbanivka icon of the Mother of God was found³.

Two sources relate the finding of the image, and their accounts differ a little. The icon was found at the beginning of the eighteenth century - by other accounts, in the first half of the seventeenth - in a wooded, unsettled place on the edge of Poltava, where only a Cossack by the surname of Horban lived, and from him the village in time took its name⁴. The Cossack kept bees, and once, while he was mowing grass, his scythe struck something hard³ - by the other telling it suddenly broke⁴; bending down, he saw an icon of the Mother of God in the grass³. The blade of the scythe had wounded the face of the Most Pure beneath her right eye, and a tear ran from it; the mark of the blow and the tear are still clearly visible on the icon⁴. The icon is painted on metal, and its edges had been cut, which showed that the holy thing had been deliberately damaged³. Horban carried the image home and told the clergy of his find³. By the type of its painting the Horbanivka icon proved to be a copy of the wonderworking Korsun icon of the Mother of God⁴. On the place where the icon appeared a healing spring broke out, and it flows to this day^{3, 4}.

Some years later a church was built in Horbanivka, and the holy thing found was carried into it³. In 1818, at the petition of the priest Yevtykhii Pavlovskyi and on the donations of the faithful, the church was raised in stone^{3, 4}. On its dedication the sources differ: one names an earlier church of the Nativity of the Mother of God, rebuilt in stone in 1818³, the other a stone church of 1818 in honour of the Horbanivka icon of the Mother of God⁴. Many miracles took place at the icon and were recorded in a church book, but that book has not survived to our time³.

From 1850 begins the history of the processions from Horbanivka to Poltava³. Every year on 30 June old style the icon was solemnly carried to Poltava, to the Dormition cathedral, accompanied by a crowd of many thousands, and it remained there through the summer and autumn fairs, when many people came to the city³. Processions with the icon were held every year from the middle of the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth⁴.

In the nineteen-thirties the Horbanivka church was wiped from the face of the earth⁴. For a time the processions were held within the city, and then they were forbidden altogether³. The icon had to be hidden: at first the image was in the church of St Makarii, from 1949 to 1962 in the cathedral of the Transfiguration, and from 1962, after that cathedral was destroyed, to this day it rests in the Holy Makarii cathedral of Poltava⁴. In the hymns of the Church the icon is called "the Protectress and the Praise of our Poltava land"⁴. Every Thursday evening an akathist is sung before the image, and solemn hierarchical services are held twice a year, on 13 July and 12 October new style⁴.

On 14 April 2009 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, presided over by His Beatitude Metropolitan Volodymyr of Kyiv and All Ukraine, heard the report of archbishop Fylyp of Poltava and Myrhorod on the establishment of a local celebration of the Horbanivka icon of the Mother of God on 29 September/12 October, and blessed that establishment². This is Journal No. 22 of that session².

The place where the icon appeared came back to life over two decades. People who knew the exact place where the spring had risen lived to our own days, and at the end of the 1990s the spring was cleared³. In 2009 the sisters of the Poltava Elevation of the Cross convent set up a simple bathing place there and from then on came every Thursday with pilgrims to pray, serving a moleben with the blessing of water and an akathist in the open air³. Five years later benefactors put up a good wooden bathing house over the spring, and in 2015, a little above the spring on the hill, a wooden church as well, which was consecrated on 10 December in honour of the Horbanivka icon of the Mother of God³. Half a year later a skete of the Elevation of the Cross convent was founded here, a year after that the sisters arrived, and in September 2017 the Horbanivka convent came into being³.

The canonical act came a year later. On 25 September 2018 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, presided over by His Beatitude Metropolitan Onufrii of Kyiv and All Ukraine, heard the report of metropolitan Fylyp of Poltava and Myrhorod on the formation of the Horbanivka Convent of the Mother of God of the Poltava eparchy in the village of Horbanivka, Poltava district, and blessed the forming of the house and the acceptance and registration of its Statute¹. This is Journal No. 19 of that session¹.

The house is being built up slowly: at the time of the conversation published in the eparchy's magazine a refectory and a second cell block were going up here³. The people of Poltava have restored the tradition of the processions, and the procession now goes from the Makarii cathedral to the monastery³.