Nativity of the Most Holy Mother of God Convent

The house stands in the village of Bilivski Khutory on Monastyrska Street and belongs to the Rivne eparchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church³. The village itself arose at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries¹.

Everything here began with an icon. By the house's own account, the image of the Mother of God "Seeking of the Lost" was brought back by the father of a local woman, Stepanyda Nadekha, after the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878, from a church near Constantinople that had been laid waste, and he later gave the holy image to his daughter as a blessing on her marriage¹. The eparchy's account adds the names: two brothers, Yosyp and Kyrylo, were taken from Bilivski Khutory to that war, and it was they who found the surviving icon in a half-ruined church; the icon was kept in Yosyp's house, and with it he blessed his daughter Stepanyda⁵.

On 12 April 1927, in Stepanyda Nadekha's house, as the monastery relates, the renewal of this icon began. It went on for five days and was witnessed by an eparchial commission; pilgrims set out for Bilivski Khutory, and it was soon decided to found a house here¹.

In 1928 a wooden church in honour of the icon "Seeking of the Lost" was raised on the site of Stepanyda's cottage¹. In 1930 the monks of the skete of the holy Apostle Andrew the First-Called on the Holy Mountain of Athos sent the monastery as a gift the icon of the Mother of God "It Is Truly Meet"¹. In 1932 a single-storey stone block was built in the house with living quarters and a warm church of that icon, consecrated in 1933¹. The eparchy places the founding of the monastery precisely in 1932 and names as its builder Archimandrite Meliton, who came here from the Pochaiv Lavra⁵; in the world he was called Zakharii Omelianovych Yarmus¹⁰.

In 1950 the monastery was closed. The wooden church was turned into a parish church and renamed in honour of the Nativity of the Mother of God, and the stone block was given over to secular institutions¹ - a library and a medical point were installed in it⁵.

In 1990 the block was returned to the church community, and in 1992 the house was revived¹: the medical point was moved elsewhere and the church restored⁵. In 1999 a church-wide celebration was established in honour of the Bilivska icon of the Mother of God "Seeking of the Lost"¹. And on 17 April 2000 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, by its journal no. 5, blessed the opening in the village of Rohachiv, Rivne district, of a skete of the Nativity of the Mother of God convent of the village of Bilivski Khutory, and entrusted its governance to the superior of that convent⁴.

Since then the house has been building. A two-storey annexe was added to the old block, and in 2011 a second storey was raised over the block itself; in 1999-2000 a three-storey residential block was put up housing the cells, the refectory, a guest house and the church of the icon "Seeking of the Lost" on the second floor, consecrated in 2008; in 2007 a canopy for summer services was set up in the grounds¹. The graves of Stepanyda Nadekha and of the first superior, Archimandrite Meliton (Yarmus), are preserved in the house^{1, 10}.

The feasts of the monastery are the Nativity of the Mother of God on 8 (21) September, the celebration in honour of the icon "Seeking of the Lost" on 5 (18) February and on Bright Wednesday - the second one precisely in honour of the Bilivska image - and the celebration of the icon "It Is Truly Meet" on 11 (24) June². On 24 June 2023 the house honoured the image "It Is Truly Meet", painted on Athos almost a hundred years before, and on that day liturgies were celebrated in both churches of the monastery, followed by a moleben and a procession around the house⁶. On 21 July 2025 the opening of a children's and youth camp of the Rivne southern deanery in the house coincided with the 95th anniversary of the bringing of that icon from Athos⁷.

Monastic life continues. On 18 February 2026, the day of the veneration of the Bilivska icon, three hierarchs led the festal liturgy, and the service ended with a crowded procession from the new church of the house to the ancient monastery church where the chief wonder-working image is kept⁸. On 15 April 2026, on Bright Wednesday, the Divine Liturgy in the monastery was led by two metropolitans⁹.