Rzhyshchiv Transfiguration Monastery

The Rzhyshchiv Transfiguration Monastery stands on the southern edge of the town of Rzhyshchiv in the Kyiv region, on the bank of the Dnipro¹. The house was founded in the first half of the seventeenth century by Rzhyshchiv's noble owners, the Voronych family; it initially held the status of a dependency of the Kyiv-Kyrylivskyi monastery¹.

By the middle of the same century the monastery stood ruined by an "enemy of the Holy Cross" - so states a charter of the founders' descendants, Samuil and Oleksandr Voronych, dated 2 May 1649¹.

Wars of the seventeenth century prevented the house from being restored, but its estates continued to serve the Kyrylivskyi monastery, as is known from a charter of the Kyiv Metropolitan Gideon of 21 May 1687 and the hetman's universals of Ivan Mazepa of 17 September 1687 and Ivan Skoropadskyi of 28 May 1709¹.

On 29 January 1710 Peter I, at the request of the Kyiv Metropolitan Ioasaf (Krokovskyi), confirmed the transfer of the monastery to the authority of the cathedral Kyiv-Sophia monastery and ordered the ruined Rzhyshchiv monastery to be restored and its brethren gathered¹.

In 1849 a stone Transfiguration church was built at the house, and in 1858 a wooden church was added with side-chapels of St. Filaret the Merciful and the Holy Great Martyrs Barbara and Catherine².

In 1852 the Kyiv Metropolitan St. Filaret (Amfiteatrov) transformed the house into a convent¹. The historian Lavrentiy Pokhilevich wrote in 1864 that the monastery owed its comparatively flourishing state to its first abbess, Yuliia (born Yakhontova), a noblewoman of Moscow province, who gathered the sisters, set them a good example by her own life and constantly adorned the house with her own donations¹. By 1913 the house maintained a two-grade school with an exemplary elementary school attached, an orphanage, a hospital and an almshouse¹.

In 1927 a zootechnical college was opened in Rzhyshchiv (from 1945 a construction college), and the monastery's buildings were given over to it at the same time, which led to the house's closure¹. Among the clergy serving here shortly before that was the hieromartyr Vsevolod Kudrytskyi: he later moved to Kaniv, where he was arrested in 1937, executed in 1938, and glorified as a saint in 1997-1998¹.

During the Soviet years most of the monastery's buildings were destroyed in stages; the revived house received only two nineteenth-century buildings, while the rest were demolished or given over to secular institutions².

In 1996 a men's monastery was revived on the site, and the following year it was turned into a convent¹. On 29 July 1998 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church blessed the opening of this convent of the Bila Tserkva eparchy³. By journal No. 32 of the session of 15 March 2013, the Synod changed the house's status: the convent of the Bila Tserkva eparchy was transformed into a men's monastery⁴.

For many years services were held in an adapted prayer house, and in 2007 a new Transfiguration church was consecrated at the monastery².