Zahaytsi St. John the Almoner's Monastery

Zahaytsi St. John the Almoner's Monastery is a men's house of Ternopil Diocese of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church; it stands on an artificial mound above the river Viliia in the village of Mali Zahaytsi, Shumy district, in the Ternopil region³. As early as the beginning of the seventeenth century a castle of the Volhynian Bohovytyn family stood here: in 1563 it belonged to Mykhailo Bohovytyn-Shumbarskyi, grandfather of the house's future foundress, and from 1620 Zahaytsi and its castle belonged to the foundress herself and her husband³. Researchers suppose that the monastery arose on the site of that castle, and the ditches and ramparts surviving around the Monastery Hill are taken to support the supposition³.

It was founded by Iryna (Raina) Bohovytynivna-Yarmolynska, widow of Kostiantyn Yarmolynskyi, a colonel of the army of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in memory of her late husband³. The sources give the year of foundation differently: the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine and the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine name 1625^{4, 5}; the house's first historian, the priest Apollonii Sendulskyi, wrote of 1626 without citing any source at all, while the Orthodox Encyclopedia holds 1627 to be more probable, because it is at the beginning of 1627 that the foundress is first recorded in documents as a widow³.

In 1627, with the support of Venerable Iov of Pochaiv and at the foundress's expense, a stone church in the name of St. John the Almoner, Patriarch of Alexandria, and wooden cells were laid³. The building work was blessed by Petro (Mohyla), archimandrite of the Kyiv Caves monastery, and was finished by 1637, by which time he was already Metropolitan of Kyiv³; the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine likewise derives the foundation of the house from the blessing of Iov of Pochaiv and Petro Mohyla⁵. The Russian-language page of the monastery's own site gives 1646 as the year the church was consecrated².

The completion of the building is known from the foundress's endowment charter of 28 August 1637, entered into the Kremenets town-court books³. She endowed the monastery with a fishpond, a mill, arable fields, hayfields, groves and orchards, and enjoined on the monks that they remain without fail in Orthodoxy - "of the Greek religion, not in the union"³. A village was given to the house as well, later known as Mali Zahaytsi: it grew in the middle of the seventeenth century, when peasants whose holdings the war had ruined settled below the Monastery Hill, so that at first it existed as a monastic settlement³.

The foundress's will of 1646 was certified in the Kremenets town court by Venerable Iov of Pochaiv, who came from Pochaiv for the purpose³; the monastery's own site prints his signature: "Ioann Zhelezo, hegumen of Pochaiv, asked orally, sealer by his own hand"². In 1649 she was buried together with her husband in the family vault, a stone crypt beneath the church³, and her seventeenth-century portrait is kept in the Kremenets local history museum².

In the summer of 1709, during the Swedish invasion of Volhynia, a detachment of Polish cavalry plundered the monastery, demanding that the monks accept the union at once: the church was robbed, the cells were ransacked, and many title deeds to the monastery's lands disappeared^{3, 1}.

As a Uniate house the monastery is known from 1720, when hegumen Varlaam Snitovskyi took part in the Uniate council at Zamość³; the monastery's own site and the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine date the transition to 1721^{1, 5}, while the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine puts the beginning of the Uniate period as early as 1714⁴. The next superior already bore the title of superior in the Latin form^{3, 1}.

The Uniate period left a school behind it as well: in 1761 - by another dating 1762 - a school of philosophy was transferred to Zahaytsi from the Lutsk Brotherhood monastery, in 1765 a textbook entitled "Natural Science" was written here, in 1768 the Zahaytsi monks compiled a second philosophy textbook, and from 1774 to 1794 a school of rhetoric operated alongside the school of philosophy³.

In 1749 the foundress's great-grand-nephew Stefan Yarmolynskyi, the owner of Shumsk, made a further generous gift to the monastery and handed over a family relic - the wonderworking image later known as the Zahaytsi "All-Merciful" icon of the Mother of God^{3, 5, 11}. By a tradition that Ternopil Diocese repeats, the canvas bearing the image of the Mother of God was found in the woods by the foundress's mother Yeva, and from then on the icon was the family icon of the Yarmolynskyi house¹⁰.

After the third partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth the monastery was among the first in Volhynia to return to Orthodoxy^{3, 4}. In the first half of the nineteenth century a district theological school for the children of the clergy of the Kremenets district operated at the house and was later moved to Kremenets; the sources date its beginning to 1813, 1818 or 1819 and its closure to 1853 or 1859^{1, 2, 3, 5}.

The superior of the monastery until 1829 was archimandrite Ierofei (Lobachevskyi): according to Rivne Diocese he spent fifteen years in the small unstaffed house and, having rebuilt and reorganised it, moved to the Derman monastery⁷. On 17 August 2021 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church blessed his local glorification among the saints within Rivne Diocese, the act being recorded as journal No. 33^{8, 9}, and the rite of glorification was performed on 11 September 2022 at the Derman monastery¹⁴.

In 1829 the Greek metropolitan Daniil Nikonisavskyi was buried on the grounds of the house; he had set out from Greece to escape Ottoman persecution, fell ill on the way and died at the customs post of Radzyviliv, and by the order of archimandrite Ierofei he was buried in the church, in the porch on the southern side^{3, 2, 4}.

In 1842 the monastery was raised from unstaffed to third class with an establishment of a hegumen, two hieromonks, two hierodeacons, a sacristan and a novice, while by an order of the Synod of 20 March that year the whole of the house's populated real estate - 133 male and 160 female serfs - passed to the treasury^{3, 2}. From 1865 to 1873 the Kremenets Theophany monastery was attached to Zahaytsi, and it was there that the Zahaytsi archimandrites lived^{3, 2}; according to the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine, from 1829 to 1873 the superiors of the house were the rectors of the Volyn Theological Seminary⁵.

The monastery's archive and library held manuscripts of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and early printed books, among them a copy of the Ostroh Bible of 1581^{3, 4}; the monastery's own site writes that it was here until 1914, the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine that it was here until 1924^{1, 5}. In 1914 Major-General M. Putylov, with the blessing of Antonii (Khrapovytskyi), Archbishop of Volyn, sent the manuscript collection "History of the Zahaytsi Monastery" to Kyiv along with part of the monastery's archive, and there the traces of the manuscript are lost³.

On 4 June 1899, during a thunderstorm, part of a wall of the main church collapsed and the dome burned, and fires in 1899 and 1900 damaged other monastery buildings^{1, 3}.

In 1905, under hegumen Panteleimon (Rozhnovskyi), the monastery was reorganised as a cenobitic house, which substantially increased its funding from the state treasury^{3, 2}. In 1912, on the initiative of Antonii (Khrapovytskyi), Archbishop of Volyn, and archimandrite Yepifanii, a skete in honour of St. Ioasaf of Belgorod - a small church, cells and outbuildings - was built in the monastery woods for elderly monks, and a strict rule on the pattern of the houses of Athos was introduced there^{3, 2}.

By 1917 the monastery owned a large pond, an apiary, a field and outbuildings in the tract of Dvoryshche; in that same year local peasants seized the monastery's lands, as the newspaper "Trudova Volyn" shortly reported^{3, 2}. After Western Volhynia became part of Poland in 1918 almost all of the house's land was confiscated^{3, 2}. In the middle of the 1930s two schema-hegumens, fifteen hieromonks, nine monks and twenty-nine novices lived here, and the house was known for its workshop, where monastic and priestly vestments were sewn³.

In April 1943 German troops burned the skete of St. Ioasaf of Belgorod; its residents - the head of the skete, hieromonk Nil (Hrytsiuk), four elderly hieromonks, five novices and two pilgrims - were killed, and only the young hieromonk Pakhomii survived³.

In 1949 K. Shkurenko, the regional plenipotentiary of the Soviet body for church affairs, proposed closing the monastery, and the all-union leadership of the same body supported the proposal^{3, 2}. At the beginning of 1950 the Ternopil regional executive committee handed the brothers' block and the outbuildings to the local collective farm, the community was moved to working houses of the Ternopil region - Pochaiv Lavra, the Lavra's Holy Spirit skete and the Kremenets Theophany monastery - and on 12 February 1950 the superior, hegumen Feodosii, transferred all the buildings and property to the collective farm by deed^{3, 2}. In 1961 the last resident of the monastery died⁵.

In 1952 the Zahaytsi primary school was placed in the monastery block, and in 1964 it was moved to new premises^{3, 2}. In 1960, by a decision of the Shumy district executive committee, the skete of St. Ioasaf was destroyed, and only three graves of its residents remained of it^{3, 2}. In the 1960s a radio station was installed on the Monastery Hill, and in 1975 a radio beacon^{3, 2}; according to the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine, the brothers' block of 1784 housed in turn a school, a library, a club, a shop, a tailoring workshop and an aircraft-tracking station⁵.

The church, turned into a parish church, was nevertheless never closed, and hegumen Feodosii served in it according to the monastic rule^{3, 2}. On 24 March 1964 the executive committee of the Kremenets district council struck the church off the register, but because of numerous protests by parishioners that resolution was later annulled and no final decision to deregister the community was ever taken^{3, 2}; the Ukrainian page of the monastery's own site, on the contrary, writes that the shrine was struck off the register and handed over for cultural and educational purposes¹.

From 2002, by the order of Serhii (Hensytskyi), Archbishop of Ternopil and Kremenets, work was carried out to restore the house, and a skete for monks of Pochaiv Lavra was opened at the church^{3, 1, 2}. On 9 March 2004 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, having considered the report of Archbishop Serhii, blessed the opening of St. John the Almoner's Zahaytsi men's monastery in the village of Mali Zahaytsi, Shumy district, Ternopil region, the act being recorded as journal No. 10⁶.

On the night before 23 January 2006 the chief holy object of the house - the Zahaytsi "All-Merciful" icon of the Mother of God - was stolen by robbers³; since then an exact nineteenth-century copy of the image, which had been kept in the monastery beside the original, is venerated^{5, 10}.

In 2007 the restoration of the skete of St. Ioasaf of Belgorod in the woods near Zahaytsi began^{3, 1, 2}. In the same year historians of the V. Hnatiuk Ternopil Regional Pedagogical University, together with the staff of the Ternopil regional archive, made a documentary film, "The Zahaytsi Monastery"^{3, 1, 2}.

The church of St. John the Almoner is a single-nave building, close to a square in plan, roofed with a double-pitched roof over the eastern part of which a baroque gable topped by a cross is set; a wide five-sided apse adjoins it on the east, and on the west a two-tier square bell tower with a low spire, almost equal to the church in width³. The upper tier of the facades is decorated with an arcature belt of paired arches holding twenty-four loopholes^{3, 2}, while the baroque iconostasis may have survived from the refurbishment of the church in 1720^{3, 2}.

The eighteenth-century cell block is L-shaped in plan². Among the venerated holy objects of the house are icons of St. John the Almoner and of the martyr Mamant with particles of their relics, the gift of Archbishop Antonii (Khrapovytskyi)^{3, 2}.

Since the revival of the monastery Ternopil Diocese has marked the feast of the Zahaytsi icon of the Mother of God there each year, and a cross procession sets out to the house from the Transfiguration church of the town of Shumsk, led by the dean of the Shumsk church district^{10, 11, 12}. On the third day of the feast of the Trinity the community and the faithful walk in procession to the place where the skete of St. Ioasaf stood, and pray there for the repose of the murdered residents of the skete¹³.