Protection of the Mother of God Convent

This house did not begin in Kryvyi Rih. The monastery started its history in 1995 in the settlement of Romankove within Dniprodzerzhynsk, and in 1997 it was transferred to Kryvyi Rih and placed in a building specially set aside at the present address, where a house church of the Holy Myrrh-bearing Women was arranged the same year¹. The opening at Kryvyi Rih is dated to May 1997, by a decision of the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, journal no. 17, on the petition of Yefrem, bishop of Kryvyi Rih and Nikopol⁴. The executive committee of the Kryvyi Rih city council handed over for the monastery the building of a closed pre-school, and by the labour of the sisters the former kindergarten was rebuilt into a monastic block⁴.

In 2000 the sisters were given another derelict former kindergarten building - in the village of Krasna Balka in the Kryvyi Rih district; it was repaired, converted into a residential block, and a church in honour of the renewed icon "Surety of Sinners" was opened at it⁴. The first service there was celebrated on 11 June 2000, and exactly eight years later, on 11 June 2008, the church was consecrated by Yefrem, archbishop of Kryvyi Rih and Nikopol⁴. The skete has land for kitchen gardens and the sisters keep livestock⁴; it belongs to the monastery today as well³.

In that same year 2000 a Cross was set up on the grounds in honour of the two thousandth anniversary of the Nativity of Christ, and on 14 July 2003 it was consecrated by the Primate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, His Beatitude Metropolitan Volodymyr of Kyiv and All Ukraine, during an archpastoral visit to the Kryvyi Rih eparchy⁴. In 2004 a belfry was raised in the monastery, a hostel for pilgrims built, the superior's block put in order, garages, a workshop and two boiler houses erected and a garden planted⁴.

In the summer of 2005 the building of a new monastery church in honour of the Protection of the Mother of God was begun, and in the autumn a capsule was laid in its foundation^{1, 4}. On 14 October 2012, at the feast of the Protection, the main cathedral of the house was consecrated by Archbishop Yefrem, concelebrating with Volodymyr, bishop of Dniprodzerzhynsk and Tsarychanka, and Mykolai, bishop of Kremenchuk and Lubny⁴. Today thirty-nine sisters live in the monastery - five schema-nuns, sixteen nuns and twelve ryasophore nuns⁴. Besides the obedience of the services, the sisters paint icons and sew, bake prosphora and do repair and household work⁴; a mark of the house is the Unsleeping Psalter, read round the clock⁴. The monastery lives on donations and its own work and carries on charitable work for the homeless and the poor⁴. Its patronal feasts are the Protection of the Mother of God on 1 (14) October and the memory of the Holy Myrrh-bearing Women².