Nativity of the Most Holy Mother of God in Tserkovshchina Tract Monastery

The monastery of the Nativity of the Most Holy Mother of God stands in the tract of Tserkovshchyna within the bounds of Kyiv, in a picturesque place between the settlements of Lisnyky and Pyrohiv, in the former farmstead of Vilnyi³. The house was formerly known as the Hnylets, or Hlynets, monastery and as the Skete of the Most Pure³.

Its beginning lies in the caves where St Theodosius of the Caves withdrew for the time of the Great Fast³. After the blessed repose of St Theodosius on 3 May 1074 this "hidden place" began to draw lovers of silence and of the desert life from the Kyiv Caves house, and in the twelfth century a monastery took shape near "the village of the Mother of God" and received the name of Hnylets². The neighbouring village of Lisnyky is first mentioned in the Kyiv Caves Paterikon under the year 1036⁴, and a few dozen metres from the cave of Theodosius the remains of a stone church building were found⁴.

In the first half of the twelfth century St Herasim, later the founder of the Trinity Kaisarov monastery near Vologda and a wonderworker of Vologda, laboured in this house². He came to the Hnylets monastery while still a youth, earnestly asking the brotherhood of the desert to receive him into their common life; the good elders agreed and on 4 March tonsured him a monk².

The monastery flourished: it had a stone church and many brethren². When in 1240 the Tatars fell upon Kyiv and laid waste the Kyiv Caves Lavra, the monks had to withdraw into the woods and caves near the city, and some of the Caves monks came to the Hnylets monastery and widened the cave of Theodosius here after the manner of the Kyiv caves². In Batu's invasion the Hnylets monastery suffered but was not destroyed². Its complete ruin came, in the opinion of scholars, "at the hands of the Tatars" after the raid of Edigu in 1416 or that of Meñli Giray in 1480². Then the church in the monastery was razed to its foundation, and the monks who took refuge in the caves were buried under the earth².

The desolation lasted more than four hundred years². Only ruins survived, thickly overgrown with forest, and among them the remains of the church's foundation - "Tserkovyshche" - from which the whole monastic tract took its popular name, "Tserkovshchyna"².

The lands around had long belonged to the metropolitan of Kyiv - the tracts of Hnyleccyna, Kulykove, Kalynivshchyna and Kalnyi Luh⁴. In 1504 the metropolitan of Kyiv Yosyp Saltan transferred the lands of the Hnylets monastery and part of the Lisnyky lands into the possession of the Vydubychi monastery of Kyiv⁴, and in the 1640s Hnyleccyna was returned to the Vydubychi monastery⁴.

The later history of the house is bound to the names of two rectors of the Kyiv Theological Academy and superiors of the Kyiv Brotherhood monastery - Innokentii (Borysov) and Dymytrii (Kovalnytskyi)². In the eighteen-thirties Innokentii, then rector of the academy, often spent the summer at the Kyiv Brotherhood monastery's farmstead next to Tserkovshchyna. One place drew his attention above the others - known as the "Adder's Hollow", because snakes were indeed plentiful there². Once in the spring, about 1835, he saw three boys on a hillock who took fright and vanished; looking for them, he found earth dug up on the slope and a burrow, and when he asked what sort of pit it was, one of the boys answered, "No, these, they say, are caves"². So the caves were found again. Innokentii afterwards took measures to preserve the cave and put the place in order, but after his transfer to a see of his own Tserkovshchyna was again long left without proper care².

From 1900 Dymytrii (Kovalnytskyi), then rector of the Kyiv Theological Academy and superior of the Kyiv Brotherhood monastery, conceived the wish to restore the monastery at Tserkovshchyna and began here the building of a church in honour and memory of the Nativity of the Most Holy Mother of God - on the trustworthy supposition that in deep antiquity there had been a church of the Nativity of the Mother of God on this spot².

The greatest thing to be seen at Tserkovshchyna is its ancient caves². Archpriest I. Troitskyi, whose work of 1913 the house's site reproduces, described them in the first person: "The first time I examined the caves at Tserkovshchyna was on 19 August 1901, that is, at the very beginning of the ordering of the Skete of the Most Pure"². He walked an underground corridor about a cubit and a half wide and a fathom high, saw on either side of the passage three small cells with earthen ledges, and at the point where the passage divides a larger chamber, beyond doubt a church, in which, when the earth was taken out, a pillar of the native soil was left standing by the eastern wall; that pillar, at a height of 1 3/4 cubits from its base, is divided crosswise into 4 pillars, so forming an altar with a ciborium².

On 26 February 2010 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, presided over by His Beatitude Metropolitan Volodymyr of Kyiv and All Ukraine, heard the Primate's information on the opening of a monastery for men in honour of the Nativity of the Most Holy Mother of God in the tract of "Tserkovshchyna" in the city of Kyiv, and blessed that opening¹. This is Journal No. 9 of that session¹.

On 21 September 2016, the feast of the Nativity of the Most Holy Mother of God, His Beatitude Metropolitan Onufrii of Kyiv and All Ukraine celebrated the Divine Liturgy in the house³. A special prayer for peace in Ukraine was offered at the service, and after the dismissal a procession was held round the monastery and a moleben with the blessing of water³. On the monastery's grounds there lie to this day the caves of the eleventh to fifteenth centuries - the caves of Theodosius, or of Hnylets³.