Protection of the Mother of God stauropegial male metochion

The Protection parish in the village of Mayaki on the right bank of the Siverskyi Donets, in the Slovyansk district of the Donetsk region, is known from documents from the middle of the seventeenth century¹. According to the description of the Kharkiv diocese compiled by Filaret (Humilevskyi), Mayaki had once been a town and later became a sloboda¹.

The settlers of Mayaki were of different origins, and two churches stood in the sloboda — the Trinity cathedral church and the Protection church. The first belonged to the Russian settlers and stood 100 sazhens from the Protection church, on a slope to the north; the second stood a little lower and belonged to the Ukrainian settlers¹.

The description assigns the Trinity church to a time no later than 1645 and the Protection church to no later than 1656. As proof of the antiquity of both it cites the Sviatohirsk synodikon of 1718, in which the family of Dionisii, the Protection priest of Mayatsk, is entered, and the signature of the priest of the Trinity church under a consistory decree of 1722¹.

The registers of the Trinity cathedral church were kept from 1729 to 1785. In the following year, 1786, the pikemen of Mayaki, whom the government was resettling to the Samara in the Katerynoslav gubernia, took the Trinity church away with them — and only the Protection church was left in the sloboda¹.

The Protection church, whose registers begin in 1737, was built in 1734 in the form in which the compiler of the description saw it¹.

Ancient books were kept in the church. The altar Gospel of Moscow printing of 1735 was bought by a resident of Mayaki, Andrii Pypnovskyi, together with his wife Anna, who paid 200 roubles for it, a considerable sum for that time; the inscription across its leaves was made on 23 September 1740 by the priest Zakhariia Danevskyi, and at the end of the book the same priest wrote verses in the name of the donor¹.

There were also an Anthologion of 1697 donated by a Cossack of the Izium regiment, a Pentecostarion of Chernihiv printing of 1685 and a Prologue of 1685; in the inscriptions on these books the church is called the church of the Most Holy Mother of God in the town of Mayaki¹.

A silver tabernacle was kept in the church as well, with a carved inscription saying that it was made in 1766 in the military sloboda of Mayaki in the Protection church, in the time of the priest Mykolai Hryhorievskyi and the church warden Petro Hershun¹.

In 1725 the consistory examined a case concerning the Old Believers of Mayatsk: the local priest Yakiv reported that 50 schismatics from among the residents of Mayaki were living in the woods and meadows near the village, and submitted a list of their names. By the time the Bakhmut chancellery had given its orders they had scattered; another priest of Mayaki, Tymofii, the consistory placed under penance for coldness towards Orthodoxy¹.

The description gives the number of parishioners at the Protection church as follows: in 1730 there were 216 men and 190 women; in 1790, when the church was left as the only one in the sloboda, there were 1,607 men and 1,400 women; in 1850 there were 955 men and 1,018 women¹.

Land connected the people of Mayaki with the Sviatohirsk monastery. According to a royal charter of 1704, before the towns of Mayatsk and Tor were founded the elders of the Sviatohirsk monastery held the lands down the Donets by grant, and when those towns arose the monastery gave the hayfields, the fisheries and all the lands as far as the mouth of the Zherebets to the people of Mayaki and Tor; the description assigns this cession to 1664¹.

Of the Soviet years the Sviatohirsk Lavra writes that the Protection church in Mayaki was lost⁴.

On 8 February 1994 archpriest Serhii Yumashev, a native of Slovyansk born on 7 June 1969, ordained deacon in 1992 and priest in the following year, was appointed rector of the Protection church in the village of Mayaki³.

In the directory of churches of the Horlivka and Slovyansk eparchy the Protection church in the village of Mayaki was listed among the parishes of the Serafymivskyi deanery district — a district that united 14 parishes in the northern and eastern parts of the Slovyansk district and in Slovyansk itself².