Iberian Icon of the Mother of God stauropegial female skete

The skete of the Iberian Icon of the Mother of God stands in the village of Sobolivka, Brusyliv district, in the Zhytomyr region¹. The Zhytomyr eparchy describes its site as a deserted spot away from the village, on the edge of a wood by the river Irpin³. The skete is not an independent house: it is a canonical division of the stauropegial convent of the Athos Icon of the Mother of God at the Kipyache tract near the settlement of Chopovychy — the name given to it alike by the Synod act that opened it and by its own web page^{1, 5}.

The skete was opened by a decision of the Sacred Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. At its session of 5 January 2013, chaired by Metropolitan Volodymyr of Kyiv and All Ukraine, the Synod heard his report on the opening of two sketes of that convent at once, and by Journal No. 01 resolved to bless both: by the first point, the skete of St Silouan of Athos in the village of Zagreblia, Malyn district, and by the second, the skete at Sobolivka¹. The convent itself had received stauropegia, that is direct subordination to the Metropolitan of Kyiv, half a year earlier, on 20 July 2012; the Synod's memorandum to that decision states that the house began as a community of sisters of mercy in 2001, received the status of a convent in 2007 and was consecrated in 2009, and that its church and buildings were raised by the Kyiv community of the church of St Michael, the first metropolitan of Kyiv².

An account of the skete's life shortly after its opening survives from the eparchial press service. In May 2013 the patronal feast was kept there: a priest of that same Kyiv church of St Michael came with a group of sisters of mercy, the superior of the convent at Kipyache with her nuns, clergy of the neighbouring deaneries and the Sunday-school children of the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God from Khodorkiv. That day a service and a procession around the church were held at the skete, and the pilgrims drew water from the spring and from the skete's wells³.

At the beginning of 2014 the skete was named in secular papers as well. According to a Zhytomyr news outlet, in December 2013 the convent applied to the Zhytomyr oblast council for permission to draw up a land-management project, and the draft decision published in January 2014 proposed reducing the forestry holdings and allotting the house more than twenty hectares in all. Of these, just over three hectares in a compartment of the Brusyliv forestry outside Sobolivka were named as the location of this very skete⁴.