St. Michael the Archangel's Monastery

St. Michael the Archangel's Monastery stands in Pereyaslav-Khmelnytskyy in the Kyiv region, on the ground of the town's old Rus citadel³. Its present community was opened in 2011¹, and the place where it lives has a written history reaching back to the eleventh century^{3, 5}.

According to the Tale of Bygone Years, in 1072 hegumen Nikolai of Pereyaslav took part in the translation of the relics of the passion-bearer princes Borys and Hlib at Vyshhorod; that mention is held to be the first notice of a monastery of St. Michael the Archangel in Pereyaslav³.

Under the years 1089-1090 the chronicle reports the consecration of a new church of St. Michael the Archangel, raised in the course of the great campaign of stone building conducted by Yefrem, metropolitan of Pereyaslav³. The same campaign produced the church of the martyr Theodore Stratelates on the Episcopal gates, the church of the Apostle Andrew the First-Called near St. Michael's church, the stone walls of the Episcopal court in the town citadel and a stone public bathhouse³. The Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine likewise calls the cathedral the work of Bishop Yefrem, consecrated in 1089⁵.

St. Michael's cathedral was a large five-naved church 33 metres long, with a single dome resting on four mighty pillars^{5, 7}. According to the edition of 2009 its plan was close in size to St. Sophia's cathedral in Kyiv⁶, while the type of the building, the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine notes, testified to Byzantine traditions and in particular to the Constantinopolitan school⁷.

The cathedral's walls were raised in mixed masonry, alternating courses of plinth brick and stone^{5, 7}. Inside they were adorned with frescoes and mosaic, the floor was laid with slate slabs and multicoloured glazed tiles, and the rich furnishing was completed by ornaments of gold and silver, which the written sources mention^{6, 7}. The cathedral had three entrances - from the west, the north and the south, formed as narthexes; the choir gallery was reached by a stair tower in the north-western corner⁷.

From the end of the eleventh century until the Mongol devastation the house was the residence of the bishops of the Pereyaslav eparchy³, and both academic encyclopedias call St. Michael's cathedral the principal building of the Episcopal court and of the whole of Pereyaslav^{6, 7}. Among the Pereyaslav bishops of that age the monastery's own site names Sylvester, who held the see from 1118 until his death in 1123, formerly hegumen of the Kyiv Vydubychi monastery and compiler of the second redaction of the Tale of Bygone Years, and the hieromartyr Symeon, killed at the taking of the town by the Mongols³.

In the twelfth century the chronicles mention St. Michael's church as a place of princely prayer and burial: in 1114, 1142 and 1151 there were buried here the sons of Volodymyr Monomakh, Sviatoslav and Andrii, and their nephew Rostyslav, son of Yurii Dolhorukyi³. The Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine calls those buried descendants of Monomakh - his sons Sviatoslav and Andrii the Good, his grandson Rostyslav Yuriiovych and his great-grandson Volodymyr Hlibovych⁵. In 1149 Prince Iziaslav of Pereyaslav prayed here before a battle³.

The cathedral suffered in the earthquakes of 1124 and 1230, and in 1239, after the town was taken by the forces of Khan Batu, it was destroyed and fell gradually into ruin^{5, 6, 7}.

In the seventeenth century the memory of the ancient house was kept by a wooden parish church of the same dedication³. Between 1649 and 1666 the Cossack Fedir Loboda, colonel of Pereyaslav and later general judge, raised a new church of St. Michael the Archangel³; the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine dates that building to 1646-1666, calls its style Ukrainian Baroque and notes that a large part of the funds for it was provided by Colonel Loboda⁷.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century a new monastery arose on the site of the ancient one, and the sources differ over its principal church. The house's own site writes that in 1711-1713 a monastic complex was built here - a stone church of St. Michael with a warm church of the Venerable Martyr Makarii attached to it, an Annunciation church, cells, the hegumen's house, kitchens, storerooms and cellars³.

The Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine states instead that a new wooden church was built in 1711-1713 by the efforts of Zakharii Kornylovych, bishop of Pereyaslav, and dates the garrison monastery of St. Michael itself to 1710, noting that it was at the same time the bishop's residence⁷.

The fire of 1734 destroyed the church and most of the house's wooden buildings^{3, 7}. In 1737 the refectory and cells were restored, in 1743-1750 a new masonry church of St. Michael was raised, and in 1745-1747 a stone belfry with cells and a refectory, in whose block the church of the Venerable Martyr Makarii of Ovruch stood until 1786^{3, 4, 7}.

From 1713 to 1786 the house held the relics of the Venerable Martyr Makarii of Ovruch, killed in 1678 at Kaniv³. They were brought here from the Resurrection church of Pereyaslav; after the fire of 1734 they remained in the refectory, in 1750 they were moved into the new church of St. Michael, and in 1786 they were returned to the Ascension monastery³. In that same year of 1786 the monastery was turned into a parish³.

From 1768 to 1771 St. Michael's house was governed - by other accounts, merely inhabited - by hegumen Melkhysedek (Znachko-Yavorskyi), later an archimandrite, a fighter for the rights of the Orthodox citizens of Poland³.

In the nineteenth century the first steps were taken here towards the study and protection of antiquities. In 1827 St. Michael's church and the belfry were entered on the list of ancient structures not subject to demolition or rebuilding; in 1840 the amateur archaeologist Oleksandr Annenkov uncovered by excavation the foundations of the ancient church; in 1845 the poet and painter Taras Shevchenko drew the church with its belfry as monuments of antiquity; in 1850 the church was renewed³.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century a stone dome rose over the church⁴; according to the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine the stone vault then collapsed and was not restored⁷. In 1823 the dome was replaced by a wooden one - it is this dome that Shevchenko's drawing recorded - and later this dome too was lost^{4, 7}. Through the Soviet years the church remained without a dome⁴.

Under Soviet rule St. Michael's parish was abolished³. In 1949 and 1953-1954 the archaeologist Mykhailo Karher uncovered and studied such remains of the ancient church as were accessible³; the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine dates those works to 1949 and 1952-1954⁵. The belfry with its cells and refectory suffered damage during the Second World War, and the church was restored in 1951-1953⁷.

In the 1950s the church, in which storerooms had been set up, was threatened with demolition, but it was saved by Mykhailo Sikorskyi, director of the Pereyaslav-Khmelnytskyy state historical museum, who opened an ethnographic exhibition here³.

In 1974 Sikorskyi, the archaeologist Viktor Kharlamov and the architectural historian Yurii Aseiev cleared the foundations of the ancient church again and examined sections not opened before³; the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine assigns Kharlamov's investigation to 1975⁵. In 1979 an underground pavilion was raised over the northern part of the excavated foundations, and the southern and eastern sides were marked out on the surface with rubble^{3, 4}.

In 1982 the Museum of the Architecture of Ancient Pereyaslav was opened in the pavilion, with the material of the excavations, drawings and reconstructions of Pereyaslav monuments of the eleventh and twelfth centuries^{3, 4, 7}. Since 1959 the church building itself has housed a department of the Pereyaslav national historical and ethnographic reserve - a museum of Ukrainian folk dress of the Middle Dnieper region of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries⁷. Under the threshold of the western narthex lies the burial of I. Berlo, regimental judge of Pereyaslav, of 1720, father of A. Berlo, bishop of Pereyaslav⁷.

The present church is of stone, plastered, in plan close to the three-part type: its elongated rectangular main space is covered by a semicircular vault with lunettes, and the apse and the babynets adjoin it⁷. A frieze with ceramic rosettes girds the building along its perimeter, the walls are articulated by pilasters, and the windows are crowned by small pediments with stucco⁷. The interior preserves paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which belong to the Kyiv school^{4, 7}.

In July 2007 a small tent church of St. Michael the Archangel was set up beside the old church of St. Michael, which then housed the museum of folk dress; its parishioners put to the civil authorities the question of reviving the church life of the ancient house's shrines³. On 10 February 2011 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, by journal number 9, blessed the opening of a monastery in honour of the Archangel Michael in Pereyaslav-Khmelnytskyy¹.

Since 2010 St. Michael's church has been in the joint use of the reserve and the Orthodox community⁷. On 25 September 2013 the Holy Synod, by journal number 58, formed the Boryspil eparchy, separating it from the Kyiv eparchy, and assigned the Pereyaslav-Khmelnytskyy raion to it; the house has belonged to the Boryspil eparchy ever since².

On 20 November 2022 a portion of the relics of the Venerable Martyr Makarii of Ovruch was brought to the monastery together with the old wooden coffin - to the very place where his relics had been kept in the eighteenth century; the handover was timed to the eightieth anniversary of the removal of the relics from Pereyaslav to Cherkasy in 1942⁸.