"She Who is Quick to Hear" Icon of the Mother of God Monastery

The settlement of Babai near Kharkiv, founded in 1643, was called simply Babai for seven years: the nickname "Babai" was given to Fedir Klymentiev, who came to these lands among the Chuhuiv boyar servitors, and from his nickname came the name of the settlement¹. In 1650 a wooden church was built here, consecrated in honour of the Archangel Michael, and the inhabitants conceived the idea of giving their village a more euphonious name, after the church, so that Babai became Arkhanhelske¹. For a time both names were used side by side, but the new one never took root: as early as the eighteenth century it fell away, and only Babai remained in the documents¹.

In 1782 a stone church was raised in Babai, which the newspaper Slobidskyi Krai calls the first stone church of the Kharkiv uyezd, and its architect Petro Yaroslavskyi, a pupil of Vasyl Bazhenov, one of the most celebrated builders of pre-revolutionary Kharkiv region¹. According to the same feature, pre-revolutionary researchers wrote that the stone church at Babai was very beautiful and refined, and Heorhii Lukomskyi, a student of noble estates, left at the beginning of the twentieth century a description of its iconostasis, painted in green and white tones, and of the leaves of the royal doors with garlands and vine branches¹.

The church stood beside the estate that belonged to the heirs of the first governor of Kharkiv, Yevdokym Shcherbynin, and at that estate, as the same feature writes, the poet and wandering philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda undoubtedly stayed: he was the guest not of the owners themselves but of the local priest Yakov Pravytskyi, who lived in the annexe, and it was here that he wrote his Kharkiv Fables¹. The stone church has not survived to our own day - in the 1930s it was taken apart for its bricks, which were used to build a school, and a house of culture with a park stands on the site of the church¹.

The present Archangel Michael church at Babai is a new building. On 19 September 2009 the vicar of the Kharkiv Diocese, Archbishop Onufriy of Izium, concelebrating with the clergy, consecrated the altar of the new church and thanked the benefactors and parishioners for their labours in the revival of the Orthodox faith at Babai². On 2 December 2012 Archbishop Onufriy of Kharkiv and Bohodukhiv celebrated the liturgy in the lower chapel of the church, and at its close consecrated, in the Sunday school attached to the church, a wall painting executed by students of the icon-painting department of the Kharkiv Theological Seminary³. On 21 July 2015 Metropolitan Onufriy of Kharkiv and Bohodukhiv consecrated the cupola for the church then under construction⁴, and in 2018, according to the diocese, he examined the progress of the building works on the upper church⁵.

On 19 September 2022, with the blessing of Metropolitan Onufriy of Kharkiv and Bohodukhiv, the main altar in honour of the "She Who is Quick to Hear" icon of the Mother of God was consecrated in the Archangel Michael church at Babai^{6, 7}. On 10 April 2024 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, in answer to the reports of the diocesan bishops, established at Babai in the Kharkiv Diocese a monastery for men in honour of the same icon⁸.

On 2 May 2024, on Great Thursday of Holy Week, a cleric of the Kharkiv Diocese was tonsured a monk in the house and received his name in honour of the holy chief apostle Peter⁹. On 7 May, the Tuesday of Bright Week, during the liturgy in the monastery the journal of the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church establishing the house was read out at the Little Entrance¹⁰.