St. Nicholas's female skete

St. Nicholas's female skete is a skete of the Protection of the Mother of God Convent in Kyiv; it stands in the Poliskyi district of Kyiv region, right on the edge of the thirty-kilometre exclusion zone².

The skete arose on the site of an old Old Believer settlement. In the 1760s and 1770s, when Chornobyl belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the town's owner Jan Chodkiewicz allowed Old Believers fleeing persecution in the Russian Empire to settle there³.

Old Believer communities lived in Chornobyl itself and in the surrounding villages, among them Bychky, Hlynka, Zamoshnia and Krasylivka³.

In the village of Bychky there stood the Novo-Mykilskyi men's monastery; the Bolsheviks closed it in 1930³.

The masonry church of the former house survived: in the 1950s it held a shop, later the building was restored, and it became the skete's main church³. The sources differ on that church's dedication - a Kyiv publication calls it the St. Nicholas church of the Novo-Mykilskyi monastery³, while a 2011 television report names the surviving church as the church of the Nativity of Christ².

In the early 2000s novices of the Protection of the Mother of God Convent in Kyiv chose this historic place to found a skete; the old buildings were dismantled and new cells and outbuildings were put up in their place³.

In the spring of 2011 a film crew found, on a site that a year earlier had been wasteland and ruins, a skete of the Protection of the Mother of God Convent in which six nuns lived and worked².

A priest came to the skete every day and, together with the novices, prayed for the health of the workers of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant and served requiems for those killed in the 1986 accident².

On 26 August 2011 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, chaired by Metropolitan Volodymyr of Kyiv and All Ukraine, by Journal No. 68 blessed the opening of St. Nicholas's Skete of the Protection of the Mother of God Convent of the city of Kyiv; the act names the skete's place as the village of Ordzhonikidze in the Poliskyi district of Kyiv region¹.

The convent's own site records this house as the skete of St. Nicholas of Myra, founded in 2011⁴.

The Protection of the Mother of God Convent in Kyiv itself was founded on 11 January 1889; its foundress was Grand Duchess Alexandra Petrovna, who in the autumn of that year took secret monastic vows with the name Anastasia⁵.