Mukachevo St. Nicholas's Convent

The house stands on the northern edge of Mukachevo, on the slope of Chernecha Hora, the Monks' Hill^{1, 3}, on Vasyl Pronin Street, and belongs to the Mukachevo eparchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church⁴.

The oldest layer of its history is a cave one. The house itself traces its beginning to the 11th century: King Endre, brought up at the court of Yaroslav the Wise and married to his daughter Anastasia, founded with his wife a number of Orthodox monasteries in the Hungarian kingdom, and the monks who came with them from the Kyiv-Pechersk monastery dug caves in the slope of the hill like those of Kyiv and settled in them; on the far side of Chernecha Hora, two kilometres from the house, the remains of these caves with their gallery passages survive to this day, and beside them a spring which tradition says the hermits dug¹. The Encyclopaedia of the History of Ukraine records a different church tradition: that monks settled on Chernecha Hora as early as the 12th century and a cave monastery worked there³. Both versions are given in the sources themselves as tradition.

The Mukachevo Chronicle records that Prince Fedir Koriatovych of Podillia came to Hungarian Rus in 1339, received the Mukachevo domain from King Charles I and, having settled in the castle, built on the hill a monastery to move the monks out of the cave dwelling - a wooden church and a small block for the brethren. On 8 March 1360 he gave the monastery a charter securing to it the villages of Lavky and Bobovyshche with all their dues, a tenth of the vineyard on the hills called Ivan and Lovachka, certain dues from Oroshvyhovo and from the Mukachevo castle, and describing the monastery's own territory with its mill and lands¹. The same chronicle, found in the monastery's archive by its hegumen Anatolii Kralytskyi and published in 1847, records: "in the honour and memory of Nicholas the Hierarch of Christ he laid this church and led the monks out, in the year 1360, on the 8th day of March"¹. The academic encyclopaedia dates the foundation more widely - to the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries, by Prince Fedir Koriatovych, as an Orthodox men's monastery³.

The first hegumen of the rebuilt house named in the documents was Luka¹. The first bishop of Mukachevo, confirmed by a charter of 31 July 1491, was Ioann, the locum tenens of the Mukachevo monastery¹. During the war between the Habsburgs and the princes of Transylvania in 1537 the monastery was destroyed, and most of its documents and archive perished with it; the revival went on from 1538 to 1550 under Bishop Vasyl I¹. From the 15th century the house was a centre of the religious and cultural life of the west of Ukraine and of the spread of Slavonic writing; a theological school worked at it, moved in 1776 to Uzhhorod and reorganised into a teachers' seminary, liturgical and instructive books were copied here, and since the monastery was at the same time the residence of the Orthodox bishop of Mukachevo it was also the administrative church centre of the region³.

The monastery's library was one of the oldest not only in Ukraine but in Eastern Europe as a whole, and its very existence in the days of Prince Koriatovych attests the connection of the Mukachevo eparchy with other centres of learning in Europe; the scholar who studied it calls the second half of the 20th century the time when the library's history stopped, its rare folios ending up in the archives of the region and in private collections⁷. A historical note on the library was written in 1962 by Archimandrite Vasyl (Pronin), who had already in 1958 published in the Belgrade journal "Hlasnik" an article on the old Serbian books it held⁷.

The official date of the acceptance of the union in the region is 1646: 63 priests then gathered in the castle of Uzhhorod, while the clergy of the Mukachevo eparchy numbered about six hundred¹. The Orthodox bishop who then lived in the monastery was Ioanykii (Zeikan, died 1684); he governed the eparchy for thirty years, and by his labours the first stone church was raised in the house¹. In 1664 the Catholic princess Sofia Bathory of Transylvania finally expelled him from the monastery and handed the house to the Uniate bishop Petro Parfenii, and Ioanykii settled at Imstychevo, where he built a monastery^{1, 3}. From then until 1946 the monastery was in the charge of the Basilian order^{1, 3}. The first buildings of the house have not survived - what remains are those raised in the baroque style to the design and under the direction of the architect D. Rats in 1766-1782, and among the proto-hegumens of the monastery were the church historian Ioanykii (Bazylovych) and the archaeologist Father Vasyl (Pronin)³.

In 1946 the monastery returned to the Orthodox Church and, with the blessing of Bishop Nestor, became a women's house¹. Its first abbess was Paraskeva (Prokop, died 1967), in the schema Nina, who came here together with nuns from other closed monasteries of Transcarpathia¹. For about fifty years the spiritual father of the house was Archimandrite Vasyl (Pronin, died 1997), a scholar who left behind church, historical and archaeological works; his study of the history of the Mukachevo eparchy appeared in 2005 as the book "A History of the Orthodox Church in Transcarpathia", and in 1954 he was awarded the degree of candidate of theology¹.

The honorary abbess of the house, Epistimia (Shcherban), lived in it for nearly seven decades. Born on 14 June 1935 in the village of Iza in the Khust district, she entered in 1952 as a novice a skete of the Lypcha convent, moved in 1955 to the Mukachevo convent, was tonsured in 1959 with the name Arkhelaia, and in 1970 received the tonsure of the mantle with the name Epistimia. In August 1993 she was elected abbess and in October confirmed in that rank, and the decision of the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of 19 October 1993, journal no. 21, concerned precisely this. She died on 4 February 2022, in her 86th year⁶.

Among the honoured holy objects of the house are the icon of the Mother of God "She Who Is Quick to Hear", the Iveron icon of the Mother of God brought from the Holy Mountain of Athos, and a reliquary with a portion of the relics of St Moses the Hungarian (died 1043)¹. The relics were brought to his native land from the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra in 1996; the portion is a large one - the greater part of the right hand^{1, 5}. On 8 August 2017, the day of the saint's memory, festal services were held in the monastery in which, together with the ruling bishop of the Mukachevo eparchy, a hierarch of the Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia took part with more than fifty clergy of the Mukachevo and Khust eparchies; they ended with a procession and the rite of the elevation of the relics⁵.

The liturgical day in the house is a long one. The evening service on weekdays begins at 18:00 in summer and 17:00 in winter, on Sundays and feasts at 17:00 and 16:00; the morning prayers and the midnight office at 6:30 and 5:30; the Liturgy on weekdays at 8:00 and 7:00, on feasts at 10:00 and 9:00, and on Sundays two Liturgies are served, at 6:30 and at 10:00. Every day akathists and the psalter are read here and molebens and memorial services are celebrated².