St. Paisius Velichkovsky's stauropegial Monastery

The stauropegial male monastery in honour of St Paisius Velichkovsky arose in the village of Morozivka not far from Sevastopol¹. Until 1948 the village was called Alsu².

Little is recorded of old Alsu: in 1778, 289 Christians resettled from it to the Azov region, and in the Cameral Description of Crimea of 1784 the settlement was no longer listed². In 1796 land here was allotted to officers of the Greek battalion, yet a register of 1805 does not mention Alsu; it was put on the map of Crimea in 1842².

The house began with an attempt to restore the ancient monastery at Chersonesos: in 1999 a monastery was registered at the cathedral of the holy prince Volodymyr Equal-to-the-Apostles, which was then being rebuilt on the ruins of Chersonesos³.

But since the grounds and part of the buildings of the old monastery had belonged to the Chersonesos Taurica reserve since Soviet times, the cathedral was restored in 1997-2004 as a parish church and received the status of a cathedral, while the arrangement of the house went on further — on land donated by benefactors at Morozivka³.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century the builder of the monastery was Father Paisius (Dmokhovskyi), and in 2005 the church of St Paisius Velichkovsky was completed in the house³. The monastery's own page also mentions the reburial of remains from a ruined cemetery of another monastery which the brethren found in the mountains³.

The foundation of the house is reckoned from 2010⁴; in that same year it received the status of a stauropegion³.

On 16 August 2011 the monastery was visited by His Beatitude Volodymyr, Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine, during an archpastoral visit to the Simferopol eparchy¹. According to the report of the Church's official site, he consecrated the monastery's cathedral church in the name of St Paisius Velichkovsky and then consecrated the site for a monastery church in honour of the Life-Giving Trinity¹; the monastery's own page describes the same event as the laying of a stone in the foundation of the large cathedral church³.

Concelebrating with the Primate were his secretary, Archbishop Oleksandr of Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi and Vyshneve, and Archbishop Feodor of Mukachevo and Uzhhorod; after the service Metropolitan Volodymyr wished the brethren God's help in their labours to revive the monastery¹.

St Paisius Velichkovsky, whose name the house bears, was born in 1722 at Poltava and studied at Kyiv; he laboured in monasteries on present-day Ukrainian lands, in Moldo-Wallachia and on Athos, and reposed in 1794 at the Neamț Lavra in Moldova⁵.

In November 2011, with the blessing of His Beatitude Volodymyr, the sacred archimandrite of the house, the superior of the monastery visited the Neamț Monastery in Romania, and before that the monasteries of Secu and Dragomirna, connected with the labours of St Paisius⁶.

At Neamț he celebrated the Divine Liturgy, at which the Gospel was read in Slavonic — from a copy printed in 1763 at Dragomirna with the blessing of St Paisius, carrying the elder's own note on the title page⁶. On behalf of Metropolitan Volodymyr an icon with a particle of the relics of St Elena of the Florivskyi convent was given to the house at Neamț⁶.

At the end of that same year the monastery kept the day of its heavenly patron in prayer: after the liturgy a moleben was served before the relics of the elder Paisius with petitions for the recovery of the sacred archimandrite of the house, His Beatitude Metropolitan Volodymyr, and church awards were given to the monastery's benefactors⁷.

On 5 November 2012 the Liturgy of the Apostle James, the Brother of the Lord, was celebrated in the house, and a reliquary with a particle of the apostle's relics was displayed in the church of St Paisius Velichkovsky⁸.

On 13 June 2013, with the blessing of the sacred archimandrite of the house, at the end of the Divine Liturgy the rite of consecrating the foundation stone of the brothers' block then being built was performed⁹. The building was begun on the initiative of a benefactor, who gave the house a copy of the wonderworking icon of the Mother of God «Skoroposlushnytsia», brought from the Athonite monastery of Dochiariou⁹.

That day a festive meal was prepared for the parishioners, and a folk ensemble of the Balaklava house of culture gave a festive concert⁹. The monastery's chronicle records that at the end of that liturgy a woman who had suffered a grave illness for many years received healing after praying before the icon of the Mother of God, and left a silver pectoral cross by the image⁹.

On 8 December 2013, with the blessing of His Beatitude Volodymyr and at the invitation of the Metropolitan of Chișinău and All Moldova, an icon with a part of the holy relics of St Paisius Velichkovsky was taken from the house to Chișinău⁵. The bringing of the relic was timed to the 25th anniversary of the saint's glorification; the image was set out for veneration in the cathedral of the Nativity of Christ, where it was to remain from 8 to 13 December⁵.

A metochion of the Ascension belonging to the monastery was at the village of Honcharne, ten kilometres to the south by road¹⁰.