Protection of the Mother of God Monastery

The Protection of the Mother of God Monastery of the Kherson eparchy stands in the village of Muzykivka in the Bilozersk district of the Kherson region, in the suburban belt of Kherson⁸. The house was opened in 2009 at the village church of the Protection of the Mother of God, whose own history begins a century and a half earlier^{1, 2}.

Two incompatible accounts survive of how the village itself began. The parish chronicle opens with a tradition about a serf by the name of Muzyka who fled from the Poltava country into this steppe as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century, moulded himself a clay dugout and began to work the land, and others came after him². The Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine, by contrast, places the first written mention of Muzykyni Khutory under the year 1815 and notes that by popular tradition the name comes from the first settler, who was a Cossack⁸.

The oldest document the parish itself knows is the register of the Holy Protection church for March 1855². The priest serving in the church at that time was Iakov Haldynskyi, and from May 1855 to December 1858 Feodor Zavadovskyi². A stone church in honour of the Protection of the Mother of God appeared in the village in 1858².

In May 1894 Mykola Levytskyi was appointed to the priestly vacancy here, and it is to him that the village owes the church which replaced the old building². The prayer house was so cramped that on the great feasts most of the parishioners were left outside, within the enclosure, and Father Mykola began to move the community towards enlarging it². After long hesitation they agreed: the money was to be raised from the householders themselves, each assessed at 50 kopecks per desiatyna of land².

In December 1894 the consistory permitted the enlargement of the prayer house, and by the design the building was to grow threefold². The whole construction was reckoned at 11,444 roubles, and only 1,800 had been collected². The year was a poor one - grain prices had fallen and land prices risen, and the house-to-house collections yielded little, because the parishioners owned no land of their own and rented it from the town². Father Mykola then asked the Kherson Duma to donate 3,000 roubles, and the Duma gave 2,000².

The new building was laid on 17 April 1895². Those who could not give money hauled building materials, and the work moved quickly to its end². When the church was finished, gifts flowed in from every side: the young people bought a seven-branched candlestick and a chandelier, the inhabitants of Vysuntsiv Khutir - now part of Muzykivka - two more chandeliers, the people of the other hamlets an icon for the high place, and with money gathered by the old women Father Mykola bought a silver-gilt chalice with a full set and ordered an icon of the holy myrrh-bearing women with its case for 180 roubles².

Permission to consecrate the church came out on 24 October, and the rite was entrusted to the local dean, archpriest Oleksii Burymovych, who performed it with three priests and two deacons concelebrating². Vespers and matins were sung by the choir of the local school of letters, and at the liturgy the town school's choir assisted; the zemstvo school in the village had opened in 1876 and the parish school in 1888^{2, 8}. The new church was of stone and roofed with iron, 4 metres high without the cupola and 14 with it, with 24 windows of which 8 were in the cupola, and it occupied 505 square metres².

From 1917 Muzykyni Khutory is already called Muzykivka². In January 1918 Soviet power was established in the village: the local authorities took the bells down from the church and carried on anti-religious propaganda³. The act confiscating church valuables, dated 27 April 1922, shows the church as fairly rich - about 7 kilograms of silver: a tabernacle, three gilded chalices with their sets, silver dishes, lamps, altar crosses, revetments from icons and a censer³.

The rector at that time was S. K. Maslianykov, a native of Hola Prystan born in 1882 and a graduate of the Odesa theological seminary; he headed the parish from 1907 - by another entry in the same chronicle, from 1908 - until 1937, and at the same time taught religious subjects in the school³.

On 28 July 1937 he was arrested on a charge of anti-Soviet agitation and held in the prison at Kherson³. Among the charges in the investigation file was that he had collected signatures against the closing of the church³. At the interrogation of 30 October 1937 he did not admit his guilt, and on 11 November he was shot³. On 9 February 1957 his widow Yevdokiia Semenivna petitioned the Supreme Court for his rehabilitation, and in that same year S. K. Maslianykov was rehabilitated³.

In that same year of 1937 the Holy Protection church passed to the village council, was closed and was converted into a club, which occupied the church building until 1941³. According to the eparchial chronicle, in 1942, during the German occupation, the church was opened by order of the German commandant and services were resumed⁷.

After the liberation of Kherson on 13 March 1944 the church's "twenty" petitioned the district executive committee to register the religious community of Muzykivka and to hand over to it, for indefinite and free use, the church together with the building inside the church enclosure and the liturgical property⁷. The rector at that time was the priest Illia Fedorov, appointed by a decree of 6 April 1944⁷.

Born in 1906 in Odesa, he had finished a church school, spent four years in a monastery and served seven years among the clergy as chorister, psalm-reader and precentor, and he received holy orders on 18 December 1942 at Kherson; the psalm-reader in the same church was his wife, Anna Kokoshynska⁷.

Father Illia was succeeded by Andrii Hotovkin, appointed to Muzykivka on 13 September 1946⁴. In those years every priest had to obtain from the regional commissioner a certificate registering him among the clergy, and to give it back when he left his place of service; such certificates for everyone who served here survive in the archive of the Muzykivka church⁴. From 16 May 1947 the parish was held by Stefan Dudkin, and from 10 April 1948 by Ioann Fetysenko, who in his questionnaire counted himself among the monastic clergy, although his name in monasticism, as the chronicle admits, is unknown⁴.

Through Father Ioann's efforts repairs began: in 1948 the church was whitewashed inside and the iron roof mended, at a cost of 1,200 roubles, and in 1949 the whole exterior of the building was renewed and the roof and the spire of the cupola painted, at 7,000; the money was paid in by the parishioners themselves⁴. Four settlements were attached to the church at that time - Muzykivka, Miroshnykivka, Vysuntsi and the settlement of Krutyi Yar⁴.

In that same year of 1949 a campaign was mounted to close the church: some of the collective farmers petitioned the regional executive committee "for the return of the premises of the village club, occupied during the German occupation by the religious community as a prayer house"⁴. The case was considered in Moscow, the community was to be given a month to move elsewhere, and the seizure itself was to be carried out tactfully, "without permitting offence to the religious feelings of believers"⁴.

Father Ioann Fetysenko, together with the church council and the parishioners, appealed to the regional commissioner to leave the church to the faithful: by his efforts the church was saved from closure, although he himself, as the chronicle writes, had to be "replaced" for it⁴.

His successor was Kornylii Kropyvianskyi, a man of Podillia born in 1889, who in 1914 was taken to the front as a militiaman of the state levy; in December he was wounded in the right arm and the left leg, taken prisoner and carried through a hospital and camps to forced labour, from which he returned only in 1918⁴.

He was a psalm-reader, from 1926 a deacon in Kherson, in 1931 left church service and until 1943 worked on the building of a power station, at a mill and at the Kherson bread factory, until in May 1943 he was ordained priest⁴. From 17 August 1955 Serhii Krasutskyi became rector of the church - and there the roll of clergy which the house keeps breaks off^{4, 7}.

On 9 September 2009 the Holy Synod of the UOC, having heard the report of Ioann, archbishop of Kherson and Tavriia, blessed the opening of the Holy Protection men's monastery in the village of Muzykivka in the Bilozersk district of the Kherson region¹. The Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine gives the same event more briefly: in 2009 a men's monastery was founded on the basis of the Protection church, which it dates to 1895⁸.

The opening itself fell on 14 October 2009, the feast of the Protection⁵. As the chronicle of the house records, the newly created monastery became the first working monastery of the Kherson eparchy within its borders as they then stood, and the Protection became the house's first patronal feast⁵. Many of the faithful gathered in the church from the churches of Kherson and the surrounding villages; archbishop Ioann presented a church award to the head of the village council for his help in returning to the faithful the premises of the Protection church and the ground adjoining it, and the celebration ended with a procession around the church to the ringing of the bells⁵.

On 7 March 2010, on the Sunday of the Cross, archbishop Ioann consecrated the cross for the cupola, and on 9 March the consecrated cupola with its cross was raised and set on the roof of the church⁵. On 14 October 2010, on the first anniversary of the opening, he celebrated the Divine Liturgy at the monastery⁵.

The treasure of the house became the icon of the Mother of God "of the Three Joys"⁶. By a tradition which the house itself relates, at the beginning of the eighteenth century a devout painter brought from Italy a copy of an image of the Holy Family, and the icon took its name from the three joyful tidings received by a woman who had prayed before it⁶.

The image was given to the monastery shortly after its opening by Nadiia, a devout inhabitant of Muzykivka: the icon had been her family's ancestral treasure and had passed down the female line from generation to generation⁶. Since the treasure was very worn it was sent for restoration, and on 14 October 2011 it returned to the monastery renewed⁶.