Protection of the Mother of God Convent

The Protection and Archangel Michael convent for women stands in the settlement of Romankove, today an outlying district of the city of Kamianske in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Its church has two altars: the lower one is consecrated to the Archangel Michael and the upper one to the Protection of the Mother of God, and this is what the house's compound name records¹.

Romankove is an old settlement on the Dnipro. The historian D. Yavornytsky held that its beginnings go back no further than the second half of the seventeenth century². A reading of the sheets of F. Schubert's map shows that in the first half of the nineteenth century Romankove, with its 738 households, was the largest village on the right bank of the middle and lower Dnipro². The village then had two centres: the upper one with a masonry Trinity church built in 1816 and a market beside it that traded on Sundays, and the lower one with a wooden church consecrated in 1793². By the house's own tradition the place is mentioned as Romankov Kurhan as early as 1390-1440, when two Cossack ascetics lived here and kept a portable church of St Nicholas¹.

Two wooden churches stood on the territory of Romankove, the Dormition church and the Protection church¹. O. Kharlan, a student of the Cossack places of worship, quoted by the authors of the settlement's history, noted that the Protection church was attached to the Dormition church, and that the material it was built of, the date of its building and even where it stood all remain unestablished². According to the local historian N. Bulanova, the locality of Prykhvostia held the Romankove two-class zemstvo school and an Orthodox Protection church built in the middle of the nineteenth century; yet neither I. Strelbitsky's map nor the map of 1890 marks a church here, and the authors suppose that it was either too low to stand out among the other buildings or was not there at all².

Parishioners tell that the Protection and Dormition churches were burnt down in 1933, in a single night¹. On the site of the burnt wooden church the faithful raised a masonry one, which the Soviet authorities approved for use as a club; the club did not last, and permission was given to take it apart and to keep the brick, but not the site¹. The parishioners then carried the remains of the church onto the grounds of the convent and laid from them a refectory and a temporary church - today the abbess's building with its refectory¹. The site of the old church stands empty: neither the civil authorities nor the neighbouring school No. 27 makes any use of it¹.

In 1994 the ruling bishop Irynei blessed the turning of the parish church into a monastery³. On the donations of the people of Romankove, and with the same blessing, building began in October 1995, and by a decision of the Holy Synod of 3 October 1995 the house's charter was confirmed¹. The new masonry church rose fifty metres from the historic site of the old one¹.

The first superior of the house was the nun Heorhiia, who headed it from 1995 to 1997, and after her Yelyzaveta (Morozova), from 1997 to 1999¹. From 1999 the house was headed by Marharyta (Shevchenko); under her, together with the priest Mykhailo (Herasymov), large-scale building began - the pit was dug, the foundation poured, the walls of the church and of the sisters' building put up, along with the roof of the upper church and the farm buildings¹. From 2003 to 2008 the house was headed by Abbess Tavifa (Hurenko), under whom the domes and the cross of the upper church and an insulated roof were built¹.

On 8 August 2019, in her 83rd year, the schema-abbess Varvara died, in the world Mariia Ivanivna Shevchenko, a bridge engineer by training⁴. The house testifies that its building began through her labours and that in ten years she raised the church, the sisters' building and the abbess's building⁴. The schema-abbess Varvara is buried in the convent of St Joseph the Betrothed in the village of Mariivka⁴.

The authors of the settlement's history describe the masonry church of the house as built in the Ukrainian Baroque style². On 14 October 2011, the feast of the Protection of the Mother of God, a Divine Liturgy was celebrated in the monastery for the fifteenth anniversary of the house; the deans of all the districts, the city clergy and guests from other eparchies came to it, and after the liturgy the iconostasis of the lower church was consecrated³.

The liturgical day of the house begins in the morning with morning prayers, the midnight office, the monastic rule and an akathist, after which the Divine Liturgy is served; towards evening compline and the evening service are celebrated⁵. The akathists are distributed through the week so that Monday belongs to the Archangel Michael, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday to the Protection of the Mother of God, and Thursday to the icons of the Mother of God "She Who is Quick to Hear" and "Hodegetria", which alternate⁵. In May 2018 the house was given an icon of the Archangel Michael painted especially for it, brought from a pilgrimage to the holy places of Georgia⁶.