St. Panteleimon's Monastery

The St Panteleimon Monastery of the Odesa eparchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church stands in the centre of Odesa, on Panteleimonivska Street, beside the railway station^{5, 6}. It grew out of the Odesa hostel of the Athonite monastery of St Panteleimon: in 1876, with the blessing of that house's superior, Archimandrite Makarii (Sushkin), several monks came to Odesa and rented premises on Nova-Rybna Street¹.

The hostel was set up for pilgrims travelling through the port of Odesa to Jerusalem, Constantinople and Athos, and it was the first of three founded in the city by Athonite houses¹. The premises were small, people waited months for their papers and their steamer, and the hostel had no church of its own. Then Yakiv Oleksandrovych Novikov, a hereditary honorary citizen of Odesa, owner of a rope factory, a first-guild merchant, sociologist and economist, bought the neighbouring plot from the landowner Semenova and gave it to the monastery for a church; the deed read: "for the building of a church and of such offices as the superiors of the monastery may find needful, with a view to providing pilgrims travelling to the Holy Places with shelter and rest of soul". The donor's name was not made public - that was his wish - and in August 1892 the Odesa newspaper reported only that the hostel had bought the house next door¹.

The foundation of the buildings and of the church was laid on 9 May 1893, and stones brought from the Holy Mountain were placed in it¹. By the design the church held up to two thousand worshippers and the living quarters up to two hundred guests at once. The first sketches were made by the St Petersburg architect N. N. Nikonov, the detailed plans by the Odesa architect L. F. Prokopovych, and the building cost 300,000 roubles, contributed by the monastery and by donors¹. On 28 December 1895 the church, with five silver domes and a high tented bell tower, was consecrated by the vicar bishop of Yelysavethrad, Tykhon (Moroshkin): the main altar in the name of the Great Martyr Panteleimon, the right chapel of the Protection of the Mother of God, the left of St Nicholas¹. The carved gilded iconostasis was made by the Moscow master N. I. Akhapkin, the icons were painted by the academician V. V. Shokorev, the murals in the Byzantine manner were done by Odesa masters, and the vaults over the choirs of all three chapels give an unusual acoustic effect. The bell tower rose twenty-seven sazhens from the ground to the cross, and carried eleven bells weighing from five to 1200 kilograms, cast at the Voronezh bell foundry¹.

In 1910, by a decree of the city council and with the permission of the minister of internal affairs, Nova-Rybna Street was renamed Panteleimonivska; the archival document gives as its reason the "centuries of historic service" of the Athonite monastery and the useful work of its Odesa hostel¹. With the outbreak of the First World War pilgrimage ceased and the Athonite hostels in Odesa emptied; the Panteleimon monastery and the St Andrew's skete set up infirmaries at their own expense under the flag of the Red Cross in their Odesa hostels¹. On 2 May 1922 the Odesa Panteleimon hostel was closed: the provincial commission for the confiscation of church valuables carried off everything it could, the icons were hacked, and the murals were scraped over and plastered¹.

In the summer of 1943 the church was opened again, and the following year, on the eve of the patronal day, by an agreement with the district executive committee the hostel was given back what had survived, the building being handed over "for free and perpetual use"¹. In July 1945 pastoral and theological courses opened in Odesa, reorganised a year later into a seminary; the building housed a small church of the Great Martyr Demetrius of Thessalonica for daily liturgical practice, lecture rooms, a library and a reading room, and on the third floor a three-altar church of the Great Martyr Panteleimon with chapels of the Apostle Andrew and of St Sergius of Radonezh¹. In 1946-1947 the future metropolitans Serhii (Petrov) and Leontii (Hudymov) taught here¹. In May 1961, on the pretext of a shortage of children's institutions in the district, the buildings of the monastery and the seminary were taken away, the seminary and the brotherhood were moved to the Dormition monastery of Odesa, and the premises housed first the lecture halls of the polytechnic and agricultural institutes and then a planetarium and a scientific-production association¹.

Church life on Panteleimonivska resumed at the end of the 1980s, and in October 1991 the first Divine Liturgy was celebrated here¹. In 1995 the church of St Panteleimon was reorganised into a monastery, and on 15 August of that year, after nearly half a century's break, the first monastic tonsure took place within its walls¹. In 1996 the main altar was consecrated in honour of the Great Martyr Panteleimon and the side altars in honour of St Sergius of Radonezh and of the icon of the Mother of God "Inexhaustible Chalice", and in the same year the house received a portion of the relics of its heavenly patron from the Holy Mountain¹.

The murals were brought back from under the plaster. As the house itself relates, in the early 1990s an altar server was driving a nail into the wall above the high place - a piece of plaster broke away, and under it appeared part of a painting; later the painting was found on every wall of the narthex, beneath a coat of house paint, several coats of plaster and two coats of later amateur overpainting¹. Today the murals of the narthex and the staircase have been restored, the domes covered with copper and gold leaf, the bell tower repaired, the facade and the entrance arch decorated with mosaic icons, and on the ground floor a small church is in use with altars of the "Reigning" icon of the Mother of God and of the Great Martyr Demetrius of Thessalonica¹.

The monastery receives pilgrims and keeps its own pilgrims' hostel, a Sunday school, a church shop and its own newspaper, cares for prisoners in correctional institutions, and has a skete in the village of Male, Rozdilna district, Odesa region^{1, 4}. Among the honoured holy objects are an ark with a portion of the relics of the Great Martyr Panteleimon, an icon of St Alexis of Carpathia with a portion of his relics, icons with the relics of the Elders of Optina and of the saints of the Kyiv Caves, and images of the Mother of God "of Tikhvin", "It Is Truly Meet" and "of Czestochowa"². The chief patronal day is 9 August; the chapels of the upper church keep the memory of St Sergius of Radonezh on 8 October and on 18 and 19 July and of the "Inexhaustible Chalice" icon on 18 May, and those of the lower church the "Reigning" icon on 15 March and the Great Martyr Demetrius of Thessalonica on 8 November³.