Bizyukiv St. Gregory's Monastery

The village of Chervonyy Mayak in the Beryslav district of the Kherson region lies on the high right bank of the Dnipro, 90 kilometres from Kherson; here stood Bizyukiv St. Gregory's Monastery⁵. A Turkish fortress had once occupied the site, and after it a Zaporozhian townlet; caves opening onto the river and the remains of ramparts were left in the bank⁵.

The house began in 1782 as a metochion of Sofroniieva Pustyn, founded by its superior, the venerable Feodosii (Maslov, died 1802)¹. In 1782-1783 a wooden church of St Gregory the Illuminator of Armenia was built at the metochion - the heavenly patron of Prince Grigory Potemkin, through whose part the government had in its time given Father Feodosii refuge from the Turks when he was superior of the Tismana monastery in Wallachia¹.

The place where St Gregory's house arose was described by the monastery's chronicler Nohachevskyi, whose work on it came out in Odesa in 1894 as a separate book of 83 pages^{4, 11}. He wrote of an extraordinarily deep ravine 16 versts from the Turkish Kyzykermen - the present-day Beryslav - called the "Propasna": covered from end to end with dense forest and scrub through which a man could barely pass, and known as a haunt of robbers⁴.

On the edge of that same ravine, on a rock, stood the "Zaporozhian townlet" - a former Turkish fortress ringed by a high earthen rampart - and it was there, in the chronicler's words, that the Sofroniievo metochion arose in 1782⁴.

Hegumen Feodosii applied to Prince Potemkin for a plot of land in the Kherson Governorate for a monastic metochion with a church, and the request was granted: by a decree of the Novorossiysk Provincial Chancellery the house was allotted 3,245 desiatynas of land by the Dnipro, on the right side of the Propasna ravine, and beyond that the floodplains across the Dnipro as far as the river Konka, containing more than 2,000 desiatynas again⁴. Several cells for the monks and a chapel were built here⁴.

Before long the church was moved, the site being inconvenient, to the opposite, left side of the ravine^{1, 4}. The new one, sturdier and with stone walls, stood until the persecutions that followed the revolution and was destroyed in about 1969; by tradition, the means for building it came in part from the Zaporozhian Cossacks⁴.

Probably soon afterwards the brethren made a cave skete in the rock above the Dnipro with a church of the holy prophet John the Forerunner¹. The underground passages and caves running into the depth of the high slopes and steep banks stretched, by the eparchy's account, for tens of kilometres, and by whom and when they were dug is not reliably known⁴. A contemporary of that distant time, according to the same account, called the place the "Tavrian Athos"⁴.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the hermitage was already called Novohryhorivska⁴. In 1803 the metochion was turned into an independent monastery and the monks of the abolished Bizyukov monastery of the Smolensk eparchy were transferred here¹ - a monastery founded in 1621-1643 by the Saltykov boyars in the village of Bizyukovo near Dorogobuzh⁴.

By a decree of Emperor Alexander I of 4 December 1803 the Novohryhorivska hermitage became the second-class Bizyukiv St. Gregory's monastery on the establishment; the Smolensk house was abolished and the establishment sum assigned to it was turned over to the upkeep of St Gregory's monastery⁴.

In 1822 a stone Intercession church was built in the house, in 1810-1827 and 1860 a stone enclosure wall, by 1862 St Gregory's cathedral, and in 1886-1893 the Ascension church^{1, 2}. In the nineteenth century a Three Hierarchs church in the bishop's house, belfries and a three-storey cell block were also put up^{1, 2}.

The house's own account dedicates that Three Hierarchs church to Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian and John Chrysostom, while the eparchy's dedicates it to Tikhon of Zadonsk, Dimitry of Rostov and Mitrofan of Voronezh^{1, 4}.

By the end of the nineteenth century, on the eparchy's account, the monastery had within its grounds the cathedral of the Ascension of the Lord and five churches - St Gregory's, the Saviour's, St Panteleimon's, the Intercession, which served as the winter cathedral, and the Three Hierarchs, a domestic church in the north-eastern part of the bishop's mansion; Italian masters were invited to paint them⁴.

In 1827-1832 the superior of the house was Father Iakov (Vecherkov, died 1850), later the well-known archbishop of Nizhny Novgorod¹.

The eparchy's account states that at the beginning of the twentieth century the house held the second place in spiritual life after the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra⁴.

By that time the monastery was a large farming enterprise: on its fields, by the same account, 1,000 head of cattle, 2,000 horses and more than 20,000 sheep were pastured, and its landholdings covered 32 thousand hectares⁴. Rye and wheat, flax and maize, millet and oats were sown here, fruit trees and grapes were grown in the orchards, monastery wine was made from the grapes, and the wheat yield on the monastery's land considerably exceeded the average for the Kherson region, standing at 70 pudy to the desiatyna⁴.

An almshouse, a hospice, a school, a hospital with a surgical department, wine and brick works, workshops and oil presses operated at the house¹. The monastery had electricity of its own as well: the archival description the eparchy reproduces names two gas generators, two motors of 30 horsepower to drive them, two water pumps, an accumulator charger and a dynamo of 23 horsepower⁴. In 1924 the station was wrecked⁴.

In August 1909 Archimandrite Veniamin, head of the Hryhoriie-Biziukiv monastery, carried the wonderworking Kasperivska icon of the Mother of God from the old cathedral into the newly built Holy Trinity cathedral of the Annunciation convent of the Kherson eparchy, and served the little vespers and the reading of the akathist before it⁹.

From 1913 pastoral and missionary courses operated at the monastery, later reorganised into a theological seminary¹. The eparchy's account dates that reorganisation to 1914, calls the seminary the only missionary theological seminary in Russia, and says its students were children from the families of the monastic settlement⁴.

In 1915-1919 the future hieromartyr Onufrii (Hahaliuk, died 1938) and the venerable Varsonofii of Kherson (Yurchenko, died 1954) lived here: the first taught in the seminary, the second studied in it and took monastic vows in 1916^{1, 3}.

The lives of the hieromartyr Onufrii recount the circumstances of his meeting at the Bizyukiv monastery with his mother, who had lost her family during the evacuation from Poland¹. Having travelled by cart as far as Brest, Kateryna Hahaliuk lost her daughter and grandchildren in the crowd, boarded a train alone and found herself in unfamiliar Kherson by herself, without shelter or means of living¹.

In despair she meant to throw herself into the river, but asked a monk who happened to be nearby whether he knew her son, who had also become a monk¹. The monk took her to the bishop's house, where the vicar of the Kherson eparchy, the hieromartyr Prokopii (Titov, died 1937), was staying; hearing the surname, he told her that her son was 30 versts away, at the Hryhoriie-Biziukiv monastery, and ordered a carriage to be harnessed, and the next day he came to the house himself and preached after the service about that meeting¹.

During the First World War the monastery took in a field hospital for the wounded¹. On the eparchy's account, in 1914, at the direction of Archbishop Nazarii, a detachment was formed from the brethren and the hieromonks, trained in medical work and sent to the front⁴.

In the summer of 1917 a congress of Orthodox missionaries was held at the house: the monastery's own account calls it the All-Russian Missionary Congress, the eparchy's the General Russian Congress of Orthodox Missionaries^{1, 4}.

In 1921 the monastery was closed and its property passed to the state farm "Chervonyy Mayak"^{1, 2}. By the house's own account, it was in that same year that this state farm began to be created on its base, and it was allotted 600 desiatynas of arable land and 400 desiatynas of virgin steppe¹⁰.

The state of the monastery in the first years of Soviet rule was described in the essay "На руїнах Бізюкового монастиря", printed in the newspaper "Наддніпрянська правда" on 19 August 1928, by Yurii Dold - afterwards the Soviet writer Dold-Mykhailyk: in his words the house, which had lived entirely on rents and the offerings of pilgrims, fell apart, and the rich monastery churches were closed⁴.

Part of the house's buildings were destroyed in time. By the description the monastery published in 2013, part of the walls, the Intercession church, the gates, a number of service buildings and part of the caves survived^{1, 2}.

The inventory of town-planning and architecture monuments of the Ukrainian SSR, published in 1983-1986, names among the survivals parts of the stone walls on the Dnipro side, three corner towers - the north-eastern, the south-eastern and the south-western - the Intercession church, the gates in the pseudo-Russian style of 1898 and some service buildings of the middle and end of the nineteenth century; the towers are round in plan, with decorative crenellation on the cornices, crowned with cupolas on octagonal drums⁵.

By the description the house published in 2010, the old monastery winery also survived in the village, built, by tradition, by Zaporozhian Christians¹⁰.

At the beginning of 1991 the Intercession church was revived as a parish, at the end of the same year a convent opened at it, in 1992 it was reorganised as a men's monastery, and in 1996 that reorganisation was confirmed by the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church¹. The eparchy's account dates the beginning of the house's revival to 1992, when services began to be held in the one surviving church⁴.

On 14 December 2007 the Holy Synod, by journal no. 120, divided the Kherson eparchy into two independent ones and formed the Kakhovka eparchy, assigning to it the Beryslav district, in which the village of Chervonyy Mayak lies⁶.

On 18 April 2008 the Synod, by journal no. 31, blessed the local glorification of Archimandrite Varsonofii (Yurchenko) among the locally venerated saints of the Kherson eparchy⁷, and on 14 April 2009, by journal no. 25, the local glorification of Archimandrite Feodosii (Maslov) among the venerables, together with three other ascetics of the Sofroniievo-Molchensk Nativity of the Mother of God Caves monastery of the Konotop eparchy⁸. Both names - the founder of the house and one brought up in it - stand on the page the monastery itself devoted to its saints, beside the hieromartyr Onufrii (Hahaliuk)³.