Nativity of the Most Holy Mother of God Glinskaya Pustyn stauropegial Monastery

The Hlynska hermitage is a stavropegial monastery for men, dedicated to the Nativity of the Mother of God, in the village of Sosnivka in Hlukhiv district, in the Sumy region². The house holds stavropegial status: it is subordinate directly to the Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine rather than to a territorial eparchy^{1, 7}.

The monastery arose at the Hlynske tract, where, according to legend, an icon of the Nativity of the Mother of God appeared in the first half of the sixteenth century - later the house's chief holy object - and where at the end of the sixteenth century local people built a wooden church of the Nativity of the Mother of God²; by the hermitage's own tradition that church was put up by a layman, Foma Mylonov, and his companions¹. From 1648 the tract belonged to the Molchansky monastery, whose monks were required from 1689 to serve regularly in that church, and the hermitage as such can be spoken of from the end of the seventeenth century² (an encyclopaedia entry of 2006 dates the founding to 1557³). The name "Hlynska" was connected by the house's own historiographers either with the clay dug nearby or with these lands having belonged for a time to the Hlynsky princes - both explanations being conjectural¹.

Around 1704-1706 the hermitage was assigned to the Hlukhiv Saints Peter and Paul monastery at Baturyn, and in 1708 Prince O. Menshikov became its patron, granting the house about 5 thousand hectares of land and building cells and a wooden church of the Ascension in 1724². In 1731 the hermitage was assigned again to the Molchansky monastery, in 1764 it became independent and unendowed, and in 1789 it lost almost all its holdings².

The rise of the house is bound up with Hegumen Filaret (Danylevsky), its superior from 1817 to 1841². He drew up a strict cenobitic rule on the Athonite model, and in 1821 that rule was approved by the Holy Synod². Fourteen monasteries or more took over the hermitage's rule in whole or in part¹. Filaret attracted donors and began systematic charity and publishing: the house kept several hostels and a hospital, and a House of Industry where peasant orphans were taught crafts and letters; from 1891 it published devotional literature, and in 1908 it opened a missionary circle¹. Where in 1817 the hermitage had about 25 residents, in 1910 it had 507².

At first all the monastery buildings were wooden². In 1770-1781 a masonry cathedral of the Nativity of the Mother of God was built, rebuilt in 1852-1864; through the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century the hermitage grew into a large architectural complex, mostly of masonry, including the warm church of the Dormition of 1848-1850 and the gate church of the Iviron icon of the Mother of God of 1826-1830². In 1828 the Near skete was founded on the site of the icon's appearance, and in 1893 the Far skete, on the site of the labours of Schiarchimandrite Iliodor (Holovanytsky)².

In memory of the ending of the cholera epidemic at Hlukhiv in 1848, an annual procession went from the hermitage to the town from 1857; the tradition has now been restored, and the procession is held on 1 September¹.

In 1922 the authorities closed the hermitage^{1, 2}. In the 1920s every church except the hospital church of the Exaltation of the Cross, and the bell tower with them, was blown up; a settlement for children from the Volga region was set up in the monastery blocks, and from 1928 agricultural and industrial enterprises used them². In August and September 1942, under the German occupation, the house was opened again and operated until 1961; in 1952 it had 60 residents². After the second closure a home for invalids, later a psychoneurological institution, was housed in the hermitage's premises².

In 1994 the hermitage was returned to the Church^{1, 2}, and on 12 September 1996 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church approved the granting of stavropegial status to the house¹.

On 8 May 2008 the Holy Synod numbered among the locally venerated saints the ascetics of piety who had laboured in the Hlynska hermitage - among them Hegumen Filaret (Danylevsky) and Schiarchimandrite Iliodor (Holovanytsky)⁵. On 25 March 2009 several more were added to their company, and the memory of the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of Hlynsk was set on 9 / 22 September⁶. By Journal No. 92 of 23 December 2014 the Synod included in the Konotop eparchy the church of the Transfiguration in the town of Yampil, a dependency of the Hlynska hermitage⁷. The patronal feast of the house is the Nativity of the Mother of God, 8 (21) September⁴.