Nativity of St. John the Forerunner Monastery

The Monastery of the Nativity of St John the Forerunner stands in the village of Verbka in Kovel district in Volyn and belongs to the Volodymyr-Volynsk Diocese^{2, 3}. It is assigned to Myltsi St Nicholas's Monastery in the village of Myltsi; both the diocese and the community itself, on its own site, call it a skete^{2, 3}.

On 8 July 2001 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, having heard the report of the Bishop of Volodymyr-Volynsk and Kovel, by journal No. 13 blessed the transfer of the Monastery of the Nativity of St John the Forerunner from the village of Kraska in Ratne district to the village of Verbka in Kovel district - to the site of the former Trinity monastery¹. The diocese dates the opening of the Verbka skete to that same year, 2001².

The place to which the community was moved has a history of its own. A Trinity monastery stood at Verbka from of old, known from the sixteenth century^{2, 4}. It is first mentioned in an act of 4-10 March 1543 by which Prince Vasyl Mykhailovych Sanhushko-Kovelsky and his family exchanged estates with Queen Bona Sforza: together with the castle of Kovel, the queen received "Вербка, манастыр Святое Тройцы" and seven monastery villages^{2, 4}.

In 1567 King Sigismund II Augustus made these estates over to Prince Andrey Kurbsky (1528-1583) - a political and military figure, writer and publicist, who in 1564 passed into the service of the Polish king and received from him Kovel, Vyzhva, Mylanovychi and 28 adjoining villages⁴. The diocese counts from 1564, from which year Kovel and its surroundings belonged to Kurbsky².

Pre-revolutionary literature held the prince to be the founder of the Verbka Trinity monastery⁴. The researcher Yurii Mazuryk notes that no direct report of his founding a new monastery in Volyn has been found, and that Kurbsky most probably became the patron - the donor - of an Orthodox house already standing⁴.

The first superior of the Verbka house known by name, Hegumen Alexander, was Kurbsky's spiritual father². After him the monastery was governed by Symeon, mentioned in documents under 1578, and the next hegumen, Isaia, left the house in 1582².

In 1581 and 1583 the prince bequeathed 5 kopas of Lithuanian groszy to the monastery and asked to be buried at the feet of his spiritual guide, Hegumen Alexander⁴. Kurbsky died in May 1583 at his estate in Kovel and was buried in the Verbka Trinity monastery⁵. Those who had left for Lithuania with the prince were buried here too: Petro Vasylovych Voronevetsky in 1582 and Kyrylo Zubtsovsky in 1594⁴.

In time the monastery was turned into a parish, and neither written documents nor folk tradition answered who had founded it or when that change took place⁴. A description drawn up during the general visitation of 20 February 1760 shows a wooden Trinity church with a single cupola, roofed with shingles and bearing three iron crosses, a bell tower built onto it with four bells, and an unfenced churchyard defended by the Turiya river alone; beside it stood a cottage with a stove faced in green tiles, a granary, a shed and two byres⁴.

The same description of 1760 mentions an ancient icon of St Nicholas of Myra: local people called the image wonder-working and said it had stood in the church for about two hundred years². In 1818 the church was renewed^{2, 4}.

In the 1840s the Kyiv Archaeographic Commission sent Mykola Dmytrovych Ivanyshev (1811-1874), professor of Kyiv University, to Kovel county to gather evidence about the life of Prince Kurbsky⁴. Ivanyshev opened the wooden floor of the church and found beneath it the remains of several decayed wooden coffins and, in one place, before the local icon of the Saviour a few steps from the iconostasis, a brick crypt that had collapsed in the middle^{2, 4}. There was no inscription either inside or outside the tomb from which the name of the buried man could be learned².

Comparing what he had found with the prince's will, Ivanyshev supposed that the brick crypt was Kurbsky's grave, and that the coffin remains between the crypt and the iconostasis might belong to the superior Alexander⁴. On the strength of these conclusions it is traditionally held that the prince was buried in the Verbka church⁴.

In 1886 a wooden bell tower was built onto the church, and three villages were assigned to it at the same time⁴. By the end of the nineteenth century the building was already in a dangerous state, so in 1901 a new church of the same name was raised on its site, which the literature calls one of the largest in the Kovel area^{2, 4}.

In that form the church stood until 1944: during the fighting for Kovel its wooden walls burned down, and the brick plinth and the foundation were afterwards taken apart by local people⁴.

The place where the monastery stood is an island of about a hectare in the marshy floodplain of the Turiya river, not far from Verbka⁴. Surveys carried out here by Yurii Mazuryk in 1999 and 2001 showed that the outlines of the former building can be traced from the silted-up trenches left by the dismantled foundation, while the eastern part of the site is badly damaged by looters' digging⁴. The land allocation project required archaeological research on the plot before any building, but, as the researcher wrote in 2013, for lack of funds it had not been carried out⁴.