Flor’s Ascension Convent

The Holy Ascension Florivsky convent is a women's house of the Kyiv eparchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church on Podil, on Florivska Street. Its patronal feasts are the Ascension of the Lord, the days of the martyrs Floros and Lauros and of St Nicholas, and the days of the Kazan, Rudnia and Tikhvin icons of the Mother of God⁴.

On 17 May 1566 the Polish king Sigismund II Augustus confirmed the archpriest Yakiv Hulkevych, together with his son and his descendants, in the right "to hold the monastery of Floros and Lauros" - a right granted him by the voivode of Kyiv, Prince Vasyl-Kostiantyn Ostrozky, and by the metropolitan of Kyiv¹. Father Yakiv's grandson, Ioann Hulkevych, a monk of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, leaving to serve at the Sluck monastery, passed those rights by a charter of 12 May 1642 to the abbess Ahafiia Humenetska¹.

An inventory of 1773 records that in 1639, under the abbess Yevfrosyniia Ulska, the convent burned down, and a charter of King Władysław of 27 December 1646 records that by the time of that abbess's death the convent church had grown "old" and "impoverished"¹. Yerlych's chronicle reports that during the burning of Kyiv in 1651 the house suffered from fire again; it evidently recovered quickly, since as early as 1655 the abbess Ahafiia made a rich donation to the Mezhyhiria house¹.

In 1711, when the building of the great earthen fortress around the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra caused a military store to be placed in the Ascension convent there, that house's nuns were transferred here together with the lands of the closed convent, and the monastery came to be called the Ascension-Florivsky^{1, 2}. In 1732 its principal church, the Ascension cathedral, was raised²; after the Podil fire of 1811 the convent buildings were restored by the architect Andrii Melensky².

In 1757 Princess Nataliia Dolhorukova was tonsured here with the name Nektariia and lived at the convent until her death in 1771¹. The daughter of Field Marshal Borys Sheremetiev, she was born in 1714 in Lubny; when her betrothed's family fell into disgrace many advised her to break the engagement, but in 1730 she married him, and the next day the couple were told of their exile¹. Two sons were born in Siberia; in 1739 her husband was executed, and with the empress's permission she settled in Moscow and devoted herself to raising her children¹. When the elder son married, Nataliia entered the Florivsky convent; in 1767 she wrote an account of her life for him and took the great schema, and in 1810 her grandson printed those memoirs¹.

In the middle of the eighteenth century Venerable Oleksandra of Diveievo (d. 1789), Ahafiia Melhunova in the world, began her monastic path here: widowed early, she came to Kyiv with her three-year-old daughter, was secretly tonsured, and later founded a women's house at Diveievo^{1, 3}.

In the first half of the nineteenth century Venerable Olena of Kyiv and Floriv, Kateryna Bekhteieva in the world, born in 1756 at Zadonsk, ended her earthly path at the convent^{1, 3}. In 1774 she left secretly for the women's monastery at Voronezh; her father tracked his daughter down but, having listened to the abbess, forgave her and accepted her choice³. When the belongings of the reposed St Tykhon of Zadonsk were being distributed to the poor according to his will, the nun Olena received the coffin that had not been used at his burial³. Slander by the abbess led to Olena's expulsion from the monastery, and the nun Yevheniia, who was close to her, left the house with her: the two sisters settled outside Kyiv and walked daily to the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra³. When the term of the expulsion expired they acquired a cell at the Florivsky convent, but the Lavra elder Mykhailo did not bless them to settle there - and the Podil fire of 1811 destroyed that cell³. After years of wandering Metropolitan Yevhenii (Bolkhovitinov) helped the sisters obtain a new cell at the convent¹. In 1834 Venerable Olena reposed and, according to her will, was buried in St Tykhon's coffin, which was noted in the epitaph on her gravestone¹. In 1890 her life was compiled and published from the account of the Florivsky elder nun Yevheniia Tkachova, and in 1913 a glazed canopy was set over her grave¹. On 9 July 2009 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church resolved to canonise Venerable Olena; on 17 August of the same year her relics were found and translated to the convent's Ascension cathedral, and on 8 October the solemn glorification took place¹.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Blessed Iryna of Zeleni Hory (d. 22 April 1843), a spiritual daughter of Venerable Serafym of Sarov who by his blessing founded a women's monastery in the Zeleni Hory, was tonsured here and laboured at the convent for nine years¹. From 1856 until her death in 1881 the house was led by the abbess Parfeniia, Apollinariia Adabash in the world, a spiritual poet whose book of verse was published in 1875 and again in 2008; she took part in compiling the life of Venerable Parfenii of Kyiv, and the service she composed to the holy equals-to-the-apostles Cyril and Methodius was published with the approval of the Holy Synod¹. In 1870 the abbess Parfeniia opened at the convent a shelter for orphan girls and for the daughters of poor parents¹.

In 1920 the convent was registered as a parish - to keep access to its churches - and as a labour artil, to keep its living space¹. In 1923 the Ascension cathedral was taken from the artil, belonged for about a year to the renovationists and then stood empty, while workers' families were settled in the house¹; in 1929 the artil was formally abolished, and in 1934 most of the nuns were evicted¹.

In 1941 the convent revived, and the nuns lived under constant risk to their lives¹. When members of the Kyiv underground secretly brought into the house exhausted children from a shelter run by the occupiers next door, the nuns helped the little ones regain their strength, and after the war some of those they had saved came back to the convent to thank them¹. As they left the city the occupiers tried to drive the nuns out, because during the fighting for Kyiv the house fell inside an "evacuation zone" - but the sisters hid, and hid other residents of Kyiv with them¹.

In the 1960s the house survived an attempt to close it once more: the nuns were deprived of a number of premises and of their registration at the convent, many were evicted, and passport checks were held from time to time¹. The persecution was stopped by the intervention of the Patriarch, to whom the abbess Animaisa had appealed¹. The convent has been active since 1991².