Krasnogirskiy Protection of the Mother of God Convent

The monastery stands on the rise of Krasna Hirka, three kilometres from Zolotonosha², in the village of Bakaivka in the Zolotonosha district⁴. By tradition it was founded at the end of the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century by a monk from Constantinople who dug a cave on Krasna Hora; in time the owner of those lands, the cossack I. Shebet-Sliuzhka, allowed other monks to settle on the hill, and they built a wattle church in honour of George the Victorious, on whose site a wooden church later stood¹. To that same church of St George the Zaporozhian cossacks gave in 1637 a Gospel printed at Lviv².

The house connects its chief treasure with a tradition as well. By that account the founder saw the Mother of God three times in his sleep; he carved from bark an image called the Korets one, and then on an oak board a second icon appeared - the Duben icon, which remains the principal holy object of the monastery to this day². Every year at Mid-Pentecost the house venerates the image "of Duben and Krasna Hirka"; the feast was established in memory of the monastery's preservation from a fire and a cholera epidemic in the second half of the nineteenth century³.

The house began to build in stone in the eighteenth century. In 1680-1687 a heated wooden church was raised here, in 1767-1771 the Transfiguration cathedral to the design of the architect Ivan Hryhorovych-Barsky, and in 1859 a stone church of the Protection of the Mother of God¹; the cathedral was consecrated in 1771 and its ornament is in the spirit of Elizabethan baroque². From 1730 to 1742 the superior of the monastery was Sofronii (Kryshtalevsky), canonised in 1918¹. After a series of imperial secularisation decrees the monastery was struck off the funded list in 1786, and in 1790 the Ioanno-Bohoslovsky convent was moved here from Kyiv¹. Between 1900 and 1917 the number of novices grew to 750¹.

In 1922 the house was closed, a home for invalids was set up on its grounds, and its holy objects were handed to the Cherkasy city museum¹. In 1941 the monastery was restored - about fifteen nuns lived here¹. In 1957 a choir block of ten cells, a farm building, a building for an almshouse and a bathhouse were put up on the grounds¹, and in 1961 part of the sisters of the Lebedyn St Nicholas convent were transferred here¹. In 1988 the restoration of the Transfiguration cathedral, damaged in the Second World War, began, and in 1991 the church was consecrated¹.

Among the holy objects of the house are the Duben icon of the Mother of God "Assuage My Sorrows" and the Kozelets icon of the Mother of God, portions of the relics of the Apostle Luke, of St Seraphim of Sarov and of other saints, and a spring named for St Sofronii¹. Beside the Transfiguration cathedral is the grave of the geologist N. Borysiak (1817-1882), professor of Kharkiv university, who spent the last years of his life in the house¹; in the monastery cemetery is buried Metropolitan Ireney (Semko) of Nizhyn and Pryluky, for whom a memorial service was held here in 2017^{3, 6}. The house is living still: on 21 March 2022 twenty-one sisters were tonsured into the mantle here⁵.