Annunciation Convent

The village of Pryozerne in the Kherson region lies on a peninsula between the lakes Bile and Bezmen, 12 versts to the north-west of Kherson; here stood the Annunciation cenobitic convent, which the Kherson eparchy counts among the well-known monasteries of the south of the country^{1, 2}.

The convent was begun by the benefactor Lev Baltazarovych Skadovskyi (1814-1886), who in 1856 set aside 280 desiatynas for a charitable institution - a shelter for girls of poor estate and for widows^{1, 2}. At first the shelter housed 3 nuns and more than a hundred poor people fed from the monastic farm, under the direction of Hegumenia Sofiia; the sisters worked the land, put up dwellings and outbuildings and laid out a garden¹. By 1866 there were already 165 sisters here, and women came from various places in the Kherson Governorate¹.

The source has no exact information about the first church or the date of its foundation; resting on tradition, it supposes that a temporary wooden church or chapel stood here¹. The community was able to begin a stone church only 12 years later: the Holy Trinity church was founded in 1868 and consecrated on 19 February 1869 - small, with a single altar, heated, of stone, roofed with iron¹.

After 27 years of the community's existence, in 1883, on the submission of the ruling bishop the Holy Synod resolved to permit the monastic community to be called the Annunciation cenobitic convent¹. The address on the occasion of this renaming was delivered by Bishop Dalmat, and the eparchy has added its text to its history of the house as a separate appendix¹. By then the convent ran a school for girls, workshops with embroiderers and seamstresses, a hostel for pilgrims and a library¹.

The house had no church bearing its own dedication, and the old church no longer met the community's needs. The nun Yevfrosyniia, to whom the temporary administration of the convent was then entrusted, asked Archbishop Serhii of Kherson and Odesa for a blessing to build a new church and received permission on 6 June 1891¹. A building committee was formed to assist the superior: its chairman was the priest Mykola Avtonomov, with the convent's treasurer the nun Feofaniia, the dean nun Poliksena and the steward nun Avhusta¹.

Construction lasted about 5 years. The new stone church, with three altars and five domes, was raised in the Byzantine style: the main altar was consecrated in honour of the Annunciation of the Most Holy Theotokos, the right one in honour of the Nativity of John the Baptist and the left in honour of the great martyr George. The cathedral was consecrated on 13 October 1896 by Archbishop Iustyn of Kherson and Odesa, with Memnon, vicar of the Kherson eparchy, concelebrating¹.

Besides the cathedral, by 1897 there had appeared a gate belfry in the same Byzantine style, a hostel with 16 separate rooms, a new and more spacious building for the convent school with its boarding house, and walls on three sides of the house with two towers at the corners¹. At the end of the nineteenth century the grounds held 2 stone churches, the belfry, a stone refectory with an upper wooden storey, 16 buildings of cells and the school-shelter building, while outside the walls stood a further 5 dwellings and 4 buildings for the farm offices¹.

In 1900, in the outer yard immediately beyond the convent walls, the Holy Trinity cathedral was founded by the care of Hegumenia Yevfrosyniia, planned for 800 people. The design was made by the Kherson architect Kazymyr Kvinto, and the church was founded on 30 July 1900 by Bishop Memnon of Novomyrhorod. The right side altar was built in honour of the Vladimir icon of the Mother of God and the left in honour of the venerable Euphrosyne of Polotsk, and the cathedral was crowned with 17 gilded domes¹.

The cathedral's murals copied the frescoes of the Christ the Saviour church in Moscow, of St Volodymyr's cathedral in Kyiv and of the churches of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, and were executed by painters invited from Moscow¹. For the consecration, a book appeared from the Khodushyna printing house in Kherson with numerous photographs of the murals of the Holy Trinity cathedral and exhaustive notes on the placing of every subject and its spiritual meaning¹.

The description of the interior that the eparchy has preserved lists half-length images of 12 forefathers in the main dome, from Adam to Jesse, 12 church hymnographers in roundels beneath the three main arches, and images of the hierarchs of Chersonese on the walls of both side chapels⁸. The central iconostasis held copies of two wonderworking icons, the Kasperivska and the Joy of All Who Sorrow, and the right-hand one a copy of the Vladimir image from the Christ the Saviour church⁸.

The consecration of the new cathedral was appointed for 18 August 1909. On 16 August Archbishop Dymytrii of Kherson and Odesa arrived at the convent by steamer, transferring to a launch 20 versts from Kherson; he was met by Bishop Serhii of Novomyrhorod and by Heorhii Lvovych Skadovskyi, marshal of the nobility of the Kherson uyezd, and at the convent itself by Hegumenia Raisa with the sisters^{1, 7}.

On the previous day the wonderworking Kasperivska icon of the Mother of God had been brought to the house from Kasperivka. In the third hour of the afternoon it was carried in procession from the old cathedral to the new one; the transfer, the little vespers and the reading of the akathist were performed by Archimandrite Veniamin, head of the Hryhoriie-Biziukiv monastery^{1, 7}. The following morning Archbishop Dymytrii consecrated the altar and the antimensia, while Bishop Serhii carried the holy relics in procession from the old cathedral to the new¹.

At the meal Hegumenia Raisa thanked Heorhii Lvovych Skadovskyi in these words: "You were not only our benefactor but the first labourer"¹. The source observes that the son completed what the father had begun: Lev Baltazarovych, by granting the land for the shelter, gave the convent its beginning, and Heorhii Lvovych built the Holy Trinity cathedral¹. The builder of the church herself, Schema-Hegumenia Yevfrosyniia, did not live to see the consecration, and the cathedral was raised over the course of 10 years⁷.

Benefactors and donors were commemorated at the house with particular care. Behind the old refectory church of the Holy Trinity lay a cemetery for benefactors; on the right-hand side of the new cathedral stood the burial vault of Lev Baltazarovych Skadovskyi, and on the left, in a vault built for the purpose, rested the remains of the convent's first hegumenia, Yevfrosyniia; over the door of that vault, in the northern porch of the cathedral, the Raising of Jairus's Daughter was painted^{1, 8}.

In 1917 the local-history newspaper "Родной край" described the procession of 24 May from the St Catherine cathedral to the Annunciation convent with the icon of the Mother of God "Zhyteiske More", which the rector of the St Catherine cathedral gave to the house. On the way the procession was met near the Presentation church, and at Arnautivka (Kamyshany) tables were set out with icons and with water for blessing; the convent's own priest Dymytrii Yakhontov served, and the image was handed to Hegumenia Raisa¹⁰.

The convent's economy rested above all on the sisters' own labour: small plots were leased to peasants, but the orchards, the vegetable gardens and the apiary were the work of their hands, and the house supplied food not only to itself but to the needy of the district¹. In 1919 everyone who could leave the house did so, and a third of the sisters remained. In the autumn of 1920 the convent shelter passed to the Unarobraz, a children's town named after Petrovskyi was set up in its place, and the monastic farm with all its lands - 415 desiatynas - was nationalised and declared a cultural state farm, whose upkeep and management nonetheless remained in the sisters' hands¹.

By a contract of 26 September 1921 the nuns took this farm on lease for 5 years. Receiving it in a year of complete crop failure, they formed the artel "Blahmon" - a name that took root among the local people - and by enormous effort kept the farm at its former level¹.

In February 1921 the party worker A. Onyshchenko was appointed head of the children's town and set out to break up the community's life: the commissions she summoned held up the artel's business, and its staff were removed from their posts in turn - first the governesses, then the teachers, then the technical employees¹. In 1922 the children's town was allotted 50 desiatynas of arable and 2 desiatynas of orchard out of the artel's land, and on the strength of a resolution of the Provincial Executive Committee of 21 March that year the contract with the artel was reworked and signed afresh on 27 March; at the same time two further documents were signed declaring the eviction of the nuns to be necessary in principle¹.

The destruction of the farm began on 25 March, by order and with the active personal participation of Radchenko, chairman of the local District Executive Committee, who appeared at the Annunciation community at the head of a detachment of 300 armed Red Army men, cadets and women communists and demanded that all the premises be vacated at once. The members of the artel were declared under arrest, and the convent library was destroyed¹.

On the third day the sisters were driven beyond the convent wall. Of the 450 nuns who had been within the walls of the house in 1919 only 180 remained, half of them elderly; for three days and nights they stayed in the open, and on 30 March they were forced at gunpoint into small outbuildings beyond the wall, 20-30 to a room¹.

The roll of the sisters of the monastic community, from the records of the Kherson state archive as at 30 January 1928, numbers 61 nuns and 94 novices. It opens with Hegumenia Raisa Ivanivna Illiashevych, born in 1852, and closes with a novice born in 1899⁹.

On 3 July 1928 the presidium of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee resolved to use the Annunciation and Holy Trinity churches for cultural and educational institutions, on the ground that they were in need of major repair¹. After their domes had been destroyed the churches served as a grain store, as workshops for repairing motor vehicles and tractors, and as a kitchen and canteen¹.

Between 1930 and 1936 the church buildings themselves were pulled down: the stone of the dismantled churches was carted off to Bilozerka and elsewhere, the convent cemeteries were destroyed and dug over, and a monument to Lenin was set on the site of one of the demolished churches¹. A Kherson newspaper article of 2011 adds that both cathedrals were destroyed by two explosions, and that of the convent's buildings only two houses and the inner gate, which had served as a belfry, survived¹⁰. Between 1945 and 1957 a mechanisers' school stood on the convent grounds - by other accounts the Bilozersk special children's home no. 3 - and a vocational technical school was afterwards established here¹.

The fates of the sisters differed. Some found shelter at the church of the Nativity of the Theotokos, the Greek church, in Kherson, where in 1950 Archimandrite Varsonofii (Yurchenko), now glorified among the saints, served; others were taken in at the church of All Saints and at the Holy Spirit, Dormition and St Catherine cathedrals, and through the efforts of that same archimandrite two houses were bought for the nuns and novices of the Annunciation convent and of other closed houses¹.

In Soviet times the nun Yevfaliia of the Annunciation convent painted icons resembling the murals of the Holy Trinity cathedral; the nun Konstantsiia, who lived at the Greek church, also painted icons with skill, and the nun Olympiada laboured to the end of her days at the Kindiika church of the Nativity of the Theotokos, serving in the sanctuary and baking the prosphora¹. The sisters poured their grief at parting from the house into a poem, "Farewell to the Cloister", which the eparchy reproduces in full¹.

On 31 May 2007 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, having considered the report of Archbishop Ioann of Kherson and Tavriia, blessed by journal no. 50 the opening of the Annunciation convent in the settlement of Pryozerne³. At the end of the same year, on 14 December, by journal no. 120 the Synod divided the Kherson eparchy into two independent ones and formed the Kakhovka eparchy, leaving the Bilozersk and Skadovsk districts within the Kherson eparchy⁴.

On 7 December 2009 the convent's gate chapel was returned to the Kherson eparchy¹. On 7 April 2010 Archbishop Ioann celebrated the first Divine Liturgy at its walls, from 23 April building work began on its restoration, and on 30 May the ruling bishop consecrated the cross set on the dome of the Annunciation church, the former chapel¹.

Alongside the work on the church, the building of temporary living quarters for the sisters was begun¹. On 29 August 2010 the Annunciation church of the house was consecrated; the service was led by Archbishop Ioann with the clergy of the Kherson eparchy concelebrating, and the faithful came in procession from the neighbouring Bilozerka and Kamyshany¹. In 2011 the house kept its patronal feast for the first time since the restoration began, the Divine Liturgy in the Annunciation church being celebrated by the same hierarch¹⁰.

By 2013 the house had a St Nicholas skete in the village of Radhospne in the Skadovsk district, where a church of blessed Xenia of St Petersburg was founded in that same year⁶. On 25 September 2013 the Holy Synod, having considered the report of Archbishop Ioann of Kherson and Tavriia, blessed by journal no. 69 the opening of the St Nicholas skete of the Annunciation convent of the Kherson eparchy on the site of the St Nicholas parish in that village⁵.