Teplodar Resurrection Convent

The Teplodar Resurrection Convent is a house of the Odesa Diocese in Teplodar in the Odesa region. The town in which it stands was laid out on 15 May 1981 on the lands of the Biliaivka district as a settlement beside a future nuclear power station, from whose warmth it took its name; the building work broke off in 1986 after the accident at the Chornobyl nuclear power station².

The church life of the town began with a parish. In March 1994 the people of Teplodar asked Metropolitan Ahafanhel of Odesa and Izmail to establish an Orthodox community, and on 30 March of the same year he approved the statute of the parish of the Resurrection church of Teplodar; its priest was Father Volodymyr (Terletskyi)^{2, 4}.

In April 1994 the hierarch consecrated a plot of land for a church building, and a wooden cross was set up there before a great gathering of people, but the plot was not handed over to the community at that time^{2, 4}.

For years the parish had no place of its own. On 5 August 1996 the regional administration's department for regional property and inventory approved the act transferring the unfinished Palace of Ceremonial Events for the housing of a church, while the plan allotting the land in permanent use was approved by the Teplodar town council only in October 2001, with the reservation "without the right of construction or repair works"^{2, 4}. The diocese adds that the foundation of that building had been laid in the shape of a cross⁴.

By a decree of the Odesa diocesan administration of 10 February 2005 Metropolitan Ahafanhel transformed the Resurrection parish of Teplodar into a convent, at the wish of the parish community itself⁹; for the new house he blessed the assignment of seven sisters of the Odesa Archangel Michael Convent^{2, 4}.

On the same day a thanksgiving service was sung at the Archangel Michael Convent, and the superior of that house gave the newly created convent the wonderworking image of the Herbovets Mother of God - one of the first gifts of Metropolitan Ahafanhel to the Archangel Michael Convent itself^{2, 4}.

The opening of the Resurrection Convent in Teplodar was blessed by the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church at its session of 9 March 2005, by journal No. 3¹.

The first years were hard. In winter the sisters had to move from a well-ordered house into an unheated, unfinished building with broken panes, without windows or doors, its walls damp and struck with mould². Two of the seven returned to their former monastery, and the ordering of the monastic life fell to five, one of them with a disability; the strength to bear it, as the house writes, came from the prayers of its spiritual father, Schema-Archimandrite Iona (Ihnatenko)^{2, 4}.

The town met the convent unkindly. The newspaper Teplodarskyi Visnyk of 22-29 July 2005 carried an appeal by residents against the transfer to the house of the building of the former civil registry office^{2, 4}. At the same period the lamp before the icon of Saint Sergius of Radonezh was smashed and the icon itself pelted with clods of dirt; on 29 October 2005 the chapel was scrawled over with obscenities; later the convent's vehicle was stolen and burned, its barn was set alight three times and its heating pipes were cut through, flooding the cellar with water².

The first benefactor of the house was Metropolitan Ahafanhel. He gave an altar Gospel, a cross with ornaments, icons of Saint Matrona of Moscow with a particle of her relics, of Saint Nicholas, of the Hieromartyr Pavlo of Odesa and of the Synaxis of the Odesa Saints, and also service books - menaia, an octoechos, the Lenten and Flowery triodia, an heirmologion and books of needs; later he paid for the setting up of the iconostasis and its painting^{2, 4}.

On 21 May 2005 Metropolitan Ahafanhel consecrated the altar of the Resurrection church and the cross for the dome of the chapel of Saint Sergius of Radonezh^{2, 4, 9}. On 10 November of the same year the cross over the central dome of the Resurrection church was consecrated and raised, and on 22 November a mosaic icon of the Saviour Not Made by Hands was set above the entrance to the chapel².

On 1 March 2006 the hierarch consecrated the domes and crosses of the Resurrection church and on the same day performed the first tonsure in the life of the house, into the ryassophore². On 7 October mosaic Cherubim were consecrated above the entrance to the chapel, and on 31 October a mosaic of the Descent into Hades adorned the facade of the Resurrection church².

On 3 September 2005 the relics of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker were brought to the house, and on that day the first cross procession around Teplodar took place².

On 13 September Archbishop Volodymyr of Pochaiv gave the convent icons of Saints Iov and Amfilokhii of Pochaiv with particles of their relics; on 5 December the superior of the Gethsemane convent of Mary Magdalene in Jerusalem gave it the relics of the Venerable Martyrs Grand Duchess Yelysaveta and Varvara; on 14 December Schema-Bishop Alipiy gave particles of the relics of Saints Seraphim of Sarov and Sergius of Radonezh, of the Great Martyr Panteleimon and of Saints Luke of Crimea, Patriarch Tikhon, Ignatiy Brianchaninov and Alexis of Carpatho-Rus^{2, 4}.

On 18 November 2007 the wonderworking icon of the Mother of God "Quick to Hearken", written for the convent on Athos, came by cross procession through Greece and Bari in Italy to Odesa^{2, 4}. The house writes that the image was painted by vow from the wonderworking icon of the Mother of God that stands on the wall of the brothers' refectory of the Docheiariou monastery, and that by order of the Athonite Protaton the newly written icon went round all the chief monasteries of the Holy Mountain². In honour of this icon a second church was raised in the house^{2, 8}.

From the Holy Mountain comes also the wonderworking image of the Mother of God "Queen of All", which became especially venerated in the convent; on 21 October 2006 it was carried in a cross procession around the town².

On 15 May 2008 - on the same May date to which the founding of the town is assigned - Metropolitan Ahafanhel consecrated at the entrance to Teplodar a mosaic icon of the Holy Passion-Bearers Borys and Hlib, the heavenly patrons of the town, and beside it, on the side of the Biliaivka road, a carved wooden cross with a crucifix^{2, 4}.

Among its holy things the house names the icon of the Mother of God "Quick to Hearken" and the relics of the Hieromartyr Kyprian and the Martyr Iustyna³.

By the house's own account the sisters carry out their obediences in the prosphora bakery, the sewing workshop and the refectory, on a small plot of vegetable beds and orchard and at the convent's apiary, and in their free time weave prayer ropes and embroider; a library of Orthodox literature has been gathered at the convent for the sisters, the parishioners and the Sunday school².

Worship in the house is daily: at six in the morning the bell calls to the morning prayers and the midnight office, then follow the akathist, the hours and the Divine Liturgy, while on Sundays and feasts two liturgies are served; vespers begins on weekdays at four in the afternoon and on Sundays and feasts at five². Nor is the unsleeping Psalter interrupted in the convent - a round-the-clock reading that the sisters carry on, relieving one another².

The Sunday school at the convent began in the autumn of 2006 with a notice on the doors of the still-unfinished house⁵. Its first teacher, a parishioner, recalls that with the superior's leave the classes gathered in the convent refectory, that the children were given something to eat every time, and that the books for the school were a gift of the bookshop of the Pochaiv Lavra⁵. A school of the same kind was opened for adults as well².

By the blessing of Metropolitan Ahafanhel a pilgrimage department arose at the house². In September 2007 it conducted a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in which 500 pilgrims and 18 bishops of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church took part, headed by the Primate; mass journeys of the same kind took place in September 2008 and 2009, and in September 2010 the pilgrimage centre of the house, together with the department for external church relations, ran a voyage to Jerusalem with a visit to Mount Horeb in Sinai².

In May 2014 the convent's pilgrimage service was represented among the heads of pilgrimage services who visited Jordan at the invitation of King Abdullah II of Jordan⁶.

The patronal feast of the house is the memory of the renewal (consecration) of the church of the Resurrection of Christ in Jerusalem; the convent kept it for the first time in 2005 by the paschal rite². In 2021 the Divine Liturgy in the house on that feast was headed by the vicar of the Odesa Diocese, Archbishop Viktor of Artsyz⁷.