St. Cyril's Monastery

The monastery at Dorohozhychi — a height above the ancient roads to Kyiv — was founded by the Chernihiv prince Vsevolod Olhovych, baptised Cyril, after he won the Kyiv grand-princely throne; the encyclopaedias date that event to 1139^{6, 7}, while the monastery's own history dates it to 1140¹. The prince dedicated the church and the monastery to his heavenly patron St Cyril of Alexandria, and Vsevolod's seals carry exactly that baptismal name¹. St Cyril's monastery is first mentioned in the chronicles under the year 1167 under the name Vsevolozh, and under 1194 the chronicle notes that the house was built by Vsevolod¹.

Buried in the church are Vsevolod's widow Maria Mstyslavivna and the wife of her grandson Vsevolod Chermnyi, Maria Kazymyrivna — in 1179; Vsevolod's son Sviatoslav, sung in The Tale of Igor's Campaign — in 1194; and Sviatoslav's son Vsevolod Chermnyi — in 1212. Both Marias and Sviatoslav took monastic vows before their death¹.

After the Mongol devastation of Kyiv in 1240 the monastery is mentioned again only in 1539, and through the sixteenth century St Cyril's church and its lands appear repeatedly as feudal property¹. From 1605 the house was revived by the labours of igumen Vasyl Krasovsky, who died in 1614, under the patronage of the Kyiv voivode Prince Vasyl-Kostiantyn Ostrozky: by 1607 the church had been repaired, in 1612 it was consecrated in the name of the Holy Trinity, with a side chapel consecrated in honour of St Cyril, and in 1613 Father Vasyl's exhausting lawsuit for the return of the monastery's lands came to an end¹.

In the second half of the seventeenth century the monastery's igumens were men of note: in 1650—1652 the future archimandrite of the Kyiv Caves Lavra Innokentii (Gizel), in 1652—1657 the future archbishop of Chernihiv Lazar (Baranovych), and for a few months of 1697 St Dimitry of Rostov (Tuptalo), who had taken monastic vows in this very house in 1668^{1, 5}. His parents Maria and Savva were the monastery's benefactors and were buried in the Trinity-Cyril church in 1689 and 1703 respectively¹.

The monastery was abolished in 1786, by a decree of 10 April⁶; in the following year, 1787, an army hospital was placed here and the church became a parish church¹. In 1830 the asylum for the mentally ill was moved onto the monastery's grounds and became known as the Kyrylivski Charitable Institutions, or the Kyrylivska Hospital¹.

The old Rus frescoes in the Trinity-Cyril church were found on 29 May 1860 while the plaster was being cleared after the fire of 1852; the church's rector, the priest Petro Orlovsky, had the works stopped and drew the attention of the church and civil authorities to the discovery². The clearing of the frescoes and their overpainting in imitation of twelfth-century icon painting was carried out in 1881—1882 under the art historian and archaeologist Adrian Prakhov, and from 1883 the work drew in 30 pupils of Mykola Murashko's Kyiv drawing school and 10 painters of the Petersburg Academy of Arts². In 1884 Prakhov invited the young artist Mikhail Vrubel, who painted the Archangel Gabriel in the place of a lost fresco and a series of compositions on the walls, and in the winter of 1884—1885 wrote in Venice the icons for the marble iconostasis — Christ, the Most Holy Mother of God, St Cyril of Alexandria and St Athanasius of Alexandria; the iconostasis was installed in 1887 and all the works on the interior were completed in 1889². The interior preserves the largest ensemble of ancient frescoes of any church of the twelfth century, 800 square metres in area².

The parish was closed in 1927, in 1929 the church became the principal object of a museum-reserve, and since 1965 it has been a branch of the Sophia of Kyiv reserve^{1, 7}. In 1993 a new parish opened in one of the rooms on the hospital's grounds and fitted out a church of St Basil the Great; from 1995 services have also been held in the Holy Trinity Kyrylivsky church — at first on feast days and Sundays, and daily from 2004¹. In 1998 the church was consecrated anew in honour of St Cyril and St Athanasius of Alexandria⁵. On Ukraine's initiative, in 2009 St Cyril's church was entered on the Tentative List of UNESCO World Heritage⁸.

On 14 June 2011 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church blessed the opening of St Cyril's men's monastery in the city of Kyiv³. On 25 August 2012 the Synod blessed the opening of this monastery's skete in honour of the holy martyr Alexander of Rome in the village of Mala Tarasivka, Baryshivka raion, Kyiv oblast⁴. On 12 February 2016, the day of the Synaxis of the Three Hierarchs, the Primate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church performed the rite of the great consecration of the monastery's church and consecrated a memorial cross set up on its grounds⁵.