Protection of the Mother of God Convent

The Protection convent in Kyiv stands near Lukianivka; the entrance to its main gate is from Bekhterivskyi lane, formerly Dionysiivskyi³.

The house was founded in 1889 by grand duchess Alexandra Petrovna (1838-1900), born a princess of Oldenburg, who carried on philanthropic work in Kyiv and lived her last years here as the nun Anastasiia³. She bought the plot of land at Lukianivka in 1888¹, the laying of the monastery took place on 11 January 1889¹, and the building of its structures - among them the five-domed Protection church - began in that same year, 1889, to a design by the architect V. Nikolaiev³. When the first necessary buildings were ready, on 20 July 1889 the grand duchess moved into the house, and in the autumn she was tonsured in secret with the name Anastasiia¹. The sketches of many of the buildings were made by her son Petro Mykolaiovych, and the drawings by the same architect Volodymyr Nikolaiev¹. The foundress died on 13 April 1900¹; she was canonised in 2009⁴. In 1890 six nuns and three hundred and forty-two novices lived in the house⁴, and in 1890-1891 a wall with holy and household gates was built to a design by the engineer K. Tarasov⁴.

From 1893 free medical institutions, maintained by the house itself, began to be set up on the monastery's grounds - a general hospital, an out-patient clinic and a pharmacy³. The hospital had 40 beds in 1893 and 200 in 1911; well-known physicians worked here - M. Volkovych, D. Zabolotnyi, M. Lapynskyi, I. Sikorskyi, M. Solomka, O. Shymanovskyi - and it was here that the first X-ray apparatus in Kyiv was installed in 1896³. Nuns and novices worked in those institutions, and in this way the foundress's idea of a "living monasticism" was put into practice³.

In 1896-1911 a thirteen-domed St Nicholas cathedral was built on the monastery's grounds to a design by the architect V. Nikolaiev, made from a sketch by grand duke Petro Mykolaiovych - the largest church in Kyiv by volume; to roof its central part a unique structure of two crossed brick arches was used, in whose design the architect O. Verbytskyi took part³. The monastery's buildings were finished with motifs of the Moscow and Yaroslavl architecture^{3, 4}. From 1894 the women's Kyiv-Mezhyhirskyi Transfiguration monastery was subordinate to the house^{3, 1}, and by 1917 the two houses together numbered more than 700 sisters¹.

During the First World War a military hospital occupied the hospital buildings, and in October 1918 the out-patient building was given to the first Ukrainian gymnasium named after T. Shevchenko³. In 1919 the community was registered with the Soviet authorities as a working religious and market-gardening community, but already in 1923 the nuns were evicted and the monastery was turned into a settlement of metalworkers¹; the encyclopaedia dates the closure to 1922 and adds that the last nuns were evicted from the residential buildings in December 1929³. In the 1930s the St Nicholas cathedral was handed to the academy of sciences for a printing house, and in 1934 the Protection church became a club of the railway hospital⁴. From 1913 the superior of the house was the confessor St Sofiia (Hrynieva): in 1931-1932 she spent twelve months in custody, and she died on 4 April 1941¹.

In the autumn of 1941 the nun Epistymiia (Samoilenko) of this house gathered the sisters who had remained in Kyiv and returned here with them; since then the monastery has never ceased its life^{1, 3}. In the autumn of 1943, when the house found itself in a zone of forced resettlement, the sisters together with 300 Kyivans shut themselves in the lower church beneath the St Nicholas cathedral and stayed there 40 days, and afterwards opened a hospital for the wounded in the monastery¹. On the night of 1 July 1981 a lightning strike set the cathedral's roof on fire². In 1989-1993 the Protection church was restored, by the architects Ya. Dikhtiar and Yu. Lositskyi³; in 1989 its plastered wooden walls were replaced with stone ones, and in 1999 it was opened². In 2006-2007 the domes of the St Nicholas cathedral were restored². The house's holy thing is the wonderworking Pochaiv icon of the Mother of God³.