Uhlya Holy Dormition Convent

The historical sketch of Uhlya Holy Dormition Convent - a house of the Hust Diocese in the village of Uhlya, Tyachiv district, in Zakarpattya - opens not with a date of foundation but with a caution: several monasteries in this locality have to be told apart under one name¹. The ancient Zanevskyi house, also called the Uholskyi, stood in the mountains above the village of Mala Uholka and declined after the death of bishop Dosyfei Feodorovych; in 1776 an attempt was made in Uhlya itself to found a Uniate Basilian monastery, which ceased to exist in the middle of the nineteenth century; and from 1925 a new Orthodox monastery, today a convent, dedicated to the Dormition of the Mother of God, was being built on the site of the former Uniate house¹.

The earliest material evidence of the ancient house was found in 1980: a bronze seal of the second half of the fourteenth century, inscribed «Печать монасътира оугольського Восъкресения Христова» - that is, the medieval monastery was dedicated to the Resurrection of Christ and not to the Dormition¹. The first extended written notice falls in 1552: a seventeenth-century chronograph from the Rumiantsev collection, number 457, has a section on the house at Zaniv describing the monastery - a church of the Ascension of the Lord, 330 brethren, sheep-keeping instead of ploughland, salt and wax workings nearby, and among the springs one whose water resembled pear kvass, and hot waters in which an egg would have boiled and to which the sick were brought; some historians of Zakarpattya retell the same notice under 1558¹. The official historical note of the Uhlya community knows the same story from the village's side: in 1558 an embassy of tsar Ivan the Terrible, returning from Constantinople, visited the tract called Monastyr in Mala Uholka, and on its return spoke of a great white giant of a stone, of a spring whose water was like pear kvass, and of water hot enough to boil a hen's egg².

The village kept traditions about its own beginnings. One of them, written down from the words of elderly people of Uhlya, placed the founding of Uhlya itself in the eleventh century, and ascribed the founding of the monastery below Mount Zanevka to the disciples of the holy equals-to-the-apostles Cyril and Methodius, driven out of Moravia; the church historiographer of Zakarpattya, archimandrite Vasylii (Pronin), observed that this indication may be read either literally or figuratively - as a memory of the disciples of their disciples¹. Some researchers refer to the Uholskyi monastery the notice of the Hypatian Chronicle under 1262 about the tonsure of prince Voishelk by hegumen Hryhorii in a monastery on the polonyna, though the monastery's own sketch recalls that historiography has attached this chronicle notice to various places¹. Another tradition, which survived to the end of the twentieth century, explained how the house was once destroyed: by one account it was burned by a local landowner, Loshkai, who was displeased that pilgrims trampled his grass, then fell gravely ill, repented and put up a new monastic building; by another, the monastery was destroyed by a Calvinist, Darvai¹.

From the middle of the sixteenth century the house from time to time became the seat of the region's Orthodox bishops. Bishop Ilarion of Mukachevo (1558-1561) lived there. After the Union of Uzhhorod a separate bishop, Ioanykii Zeikan, was consecrated in 1654 for those who did not accept it, and he too sometimes stayed at the Uholskyi monastery. Metodii Rakovetskyi was appointed his successor in 1687 and moved from Mukachevo to the monastery in 1690, but in the same year the clergy of Maramorosh made Yosyf Stoika, a monk of the Uhlya house, their bishop; Metodii left for Poland, and bishop Yosyf governed his flock from his own house, which from then on became the new church-administrative centre of the Orthodox of Zakarpattya. He died no later than 1711 and is canonised by the Romanian Orthodox Church as a confessor¹. Bishop Dosyfei Feodorovych, consecrated in 1717, also shepherded his flock from the Uholskyi monastery: the secular authorities and the bishop of Mukachevo forbade him to ordain new Orthodox priests and promised to punish disobedience, but he went on ordaining. Bishop Dosyfei died in 1733-1735 at a great age - by one account in the castle of Khust, where he had been summoned for interrogation, by another peacefully at the monastery; a symbolic gravestone of his stands in the present Dormition house¹.

A petition to revive the ancient monastery was raised in 1921 by hieromonk Yevfymii (Prokop); in the same year Bohdan Fyrynets, a man of Uhlya, put up a chapel on the site of the ancient house. Permission to rebuild the monastery was obtained, but father Yevfymii did not carry out his intention. The matter was taken up again in 1931, while diocesan papers were being sorted, and venerable Oleksii Karpatoruskyi (Kabaliuk) was asked to whom the revival might be entrusted; he pointed to hieromonk Vikentii (Oros). In 1934 father Vikentii bought two houses in the village of Krychevo, dismantled them, carted the material to the site of the ancient Uholskyi house and built from it a church and a hut of two cells. During the Second World War the monks left the monastery, and father Vikentii then settled several nuns from the house at Drahovo there - from that point the community became a women's one¹.

In 1947-1948 a new church was raised in the house, and it stood until the 1990s³. At the turn of the 1950s-1960s the monastery was closed for the second time¹; the register of sacral architecture of Zakarpattya dates that closure to 1959 and adds that the wooden church was not demolished then - it gradually decayed and was taken apart⁴. The monastic buildings were handed to a school, which could not use them because of the distance; a driving school was later placed here and began building a new block³. The same register notes that the monastery at Uhlya was considered one of the oldest in Zakarpattya, and that its restoration had been begun as early as 1920, soon after the region joined Czechoslovakia⁴. In 1990 the monastery was revived¹.

After the grounds were returned to the faithful, local enthusiasts finished the block that had been begun and turned it into cells. In 1990-1993 the church of the Dormition of the Mother of God was built, and painted in 2002-2005; in 1996-2000 a block with a winter church of the Nativity of the holy prophet John the Baptist rose on the site of the old one; in 1990 the wooden chapel of the holy prophet Elijah was renewed, and in the mid-1990s it was replaced by a brick one³. The house keeps three patronal feasts - of the Dormition of the Mother of God, of the Nativity of the holy prophet John the Baptist and of the memory of the holy prophet Elijah⁵.

On 7 June 2015, in her 91st year, the superior of the house, schema-abbess Yekateryna (Stan), reposed; the funeral liturgy and the rite of burial were served at the monastery on 9 June⁶. On 27 October 2015 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, by journal number 45, changed the name of the house - from the Holy Dormition Convent of the Hust and Vynohradiv Diocese to the Holy Dormition Convent of the Hust Diocese of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - and adopted and registered its Statute in a new redaction⁷. A skete of the holy great martyr Panteleimon in the village of Neresnytsia, Tyachiv district, is attached to the monastery^{8, 9}.

Services at the house have repeatedly been led by hierarchs of the Hust Diocese: on the day of the prophet Elijah in 2021¹⁰ and 2022¹¹, on 8 October 2023¹², and at the patronal feast of the Dormition on 28 August 2023¹³ and 28 August 2024, when a presbyteral ordination was performed at the liturgy in the monastery¹⁴.