St. Michael the Archangel's Convent

In 1835 the governor-general Count Mykhailo Vorontsov built, on waste ground by the sea at the edge of the city, a church in honour of his heavenly patron the Archangel Michael, and in 1840 the Holy Synod resolved to found a women's monastic community at that church². Among those who created the community the eparchy names Vorontsov himself and his wife Ye. Vorontsova, and Countess R. Edling, a friend of Pushkin².

Great charitable work was carried on in the community: there were a refectory for the poor, a hospital and a school for orphan girls, and the building up of the place was led by its superiors, the abbesses Tavyfa, Susanna, Arkhelaia and Rafaila².

In 1923 the monastery was closed "as counter-revolutionary", for supporting Patriarch Tikhon and refusing to join the Renovationist schism, and in 1931 the Archangel Michael cathedral and the bell tower were blown up². In the war years the community returned to life: on 27 April 1942 an act was drawn up transferring the monastic premises to the sisters, on 3 September 1944 the superior, the nun Anatoliia, was raised to the rank of abbess, and more than seventy sisters were then living in the community, working in its hospital, at the mill, in the garden and the farmyard, baking prosphora and labouring in the workshops and the church; in the post-war years the elder Ioann, in the world Ivan Petrovych Zhukovsky, a fool for Christ, lived within its walls².

In 1961 the Soviet and party authorities closed the monastery and handed its territory to the city tuberculosis hospital². The revival began in 1992: the choir block lay in ruins, the buildings stood half destroyed, and trees and grass were growing through the rotted roof². The community rose from the ruins through the care of the archpastor of Odesa, Metropolitan Agafangel, who gave it the wonder-working Herbovets icon of the Mother of God, together with a eucharistic set, gilded vestments for the altar, church vessels, several vehicles and building materials².

Today the monastery has workshops for sewing vestments, making church vessels, restoring icons and embroidering in gold and beads; there is a charitable dining hall which receives about five hundred people a day, and a House of Mercy which shelters eighty destitute people². Schools of spiritual enlightenment work here - for people with disabilities, at a children's sanatorium and at a women's prison - along with a Sunday school for parishioners; there is a library of pre-revolutionary and modern books, and exhibitions are held in the hall of the House of Mercy². The choir-directing and gold-embroidery departments of the Odesa theological seminary work at the community². Every Monday an akathist is sung in the monastery to the Archangel Michael, in whose honour it is named³; an akathist is also read here before the icon of the Mother of God "The Inexhaustible Cup"⁴.

On 26 January 2012 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, by two journals, blessed the opening of two sketes of this community: by journal no. 13 the Nativity of the Mother of God skete in the village of Baranovo, Ivanivka district, Odesa region, and by journal no. 14 the Ascension skete in Odesa¹.