"Comfort and Consolation" Icon of the Mother of God Convent

The women's monastery in honour of the icon of the Mother of God "Vidrada i Vtikha" ("Consolation and Comfort") stands in the village of Velyka Vilshanka in the Kyiv region and belongs to the Kyiv eparchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church^{1, 2}. Its opening was blessed by the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church at its session of 11 November 2008, journal No. 97¹. The foundation was conceived in memory of the former Znamensky skete of the Holy Trinity St Iona monastery in Kyiv: the locality where that skete once stood was known to the Kyivans of the day as Vasylchykova dacha, and its 42 hectares are today occupied by almost the whole of Nyvky park. Land for the new house was sought there first, but it could not be obtained, and a site was found near Velyka Vilshanka².

The lands of Velyka Vilshanka and the neighbouring villages had belonged, before the confiscation of church property in the eighteenth century, to the Florivsky monastery in Kyiv; the community learned of this only once building work had begun².

The monastery complex was raised in the Athonite (Macedonian) style, worked out against photographic prototypes; the decisive contribution to the design was that of the architect Anna Denezhna². The materials were chosen to be authentic: sheet lead for the roofing, plinth brick made in the monastery's own ceramic workshop, natural stone and timber². Craftsmen from Georgia and mosaicists from Belarus worked on the complex; the woodcarving and the marble rosettes of the floor were done by Ukrainian masters, while the wall paintings of the church and the icons of the iconostasis are the work of the Ukrainian icon painter Oleksandr Rudyi, a laureate of the State Prize².

Besides the main church, the house has a second, domestic one, dedicated to St Iona; it occupies the third floor of the main building, and the monastery's own site calls it so far the only church in Ukraine dedicated to that saint². Liturgical life began here on 13 July 2013, the feast of the Synaxis of the Holy Twelve Apostles².

In early 2010 an exact copy of the wonderworking icon "Vidrada i Vtikha" was written at the Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos as a blessing for the women's house in the Kyiv region³. The monastery also keeps a copy of the cell icon of the same image that belonged to St Dymytrii of Rostov, written at the Saviour-St James Dimitriev monastery³. One further copy - of the Serafymo-Ponetaivska icon "Znamennia" - was brought from Jerusalem as a gift to the future monastery while the question of allocating land on the site of the former Znamensky skete was still being considered⁵. The collection of relic particles is a shrine in its own right: the alphabetical list published by the house itself numbers 273 saints⁴.