St. Michael the Archangel's Convent

St. Michael the Archangel's Convent stands in the forest near the village of Zabrid in the Khust district of the Zakarpattya region; the house is also known as the Drahovo convent, after the neighbouring village of Drahovo, with which Zabrid is often recorded jointly in documents^{1, 3, 4}. The villages of Drahovo and Zabrid themselves are attested in documents from the second half of the fourteenth and the end of the sixteenth century respectively¹.

The village community of Drahovo founded the monastery in 1705 on the land of a local resident, Stepan Rishko⁴. Local historians see the reason for the appearance of monastic houses in Drahovo and in other villages of Maramorosh in the wish to strengthen the Orthodox church and to hold back the spread of the union⁴. When the church had been raised, it was consecrated by the Orthodox bishop Yosyf (Stoika): the house's own site places the consecration at the same time as the building was begun, while the local-history study dates it to 1706^{1, 4}.

The first house was dedicated to the Protection of the Most Holy Mother of God, and its first superior was hegumen Herasym (Shustiak)⁴. Later Prokopii Hodermarskyi, the Uniate vicar of Maramorosh in the years 1723-1726, built himself a house here, and in the early 1730s the last Orthodox bishop of Maramorosh, Dosyfei (Feodorovych), made the monastery his temporary residence^{1, 4}. In the judgement of the authors of the monograph, from its foundation to its closure the monastery "preserved the old Orthodox confession and did not come within the sphere of influence of the Mukachevo Greek Catholic eparchy"⁴.

Several traditions survive about the beginning of the monastery. Local people held that the house had been founded in the thirteenth century by the ancestors of the voivodes Balytsia and Drah, known as benefactors of the Hrushevo monastery, and another tradition told that at the Mongol invasion of 1241 the monks here hid in the forest¹. From the older villagers local historians recorded a tradition of monks living in the neighbourhood of Drahovo as early as the thirteenth century - probably in one of the sketes of the Uhlia monastery; no archival document could be found to confirm that supposition⁴. The Encyclopaedia of Modern Ukraine gives the same folk tradition and adds that the monastery had a printing press³.

The sources date the end of the first house differently. The monastery's own site writes that in 1788 the monastery was closed, while a tradition ascribed its destruction to a local Calvinist rich man, Loshvai, and placed the event about 1670¹. By another tradition, cited in the local-history study, the monastery was destroyed in 1761 by order of a local landowner⁴. The Encyclopaedia of Modern Ukraine writes instead that from 1670 the house was in the ownership of Romanian Calvinists and was destroyed by them in 1870³.

The place where the first house had once stood was called "the monastery" by the people, and a cross was set up there¹. In 1913 a young man, Vasyl Oros, driving oxen to pasture, met an old man who said that he was returning "from the monastery"; having learnt from the older villagers about the ancient house, Vasyl vowed to God that he would restore it¹.

The restoration of the monastery began in the 1930s with the building of a church: the Encyclopaedia of Modern Ukraine places it in 1934, the local-history study in 1935^{1, 3, 4}. The leading part in this was played by that same Vasyl Oros, a native of the village of Iza in the Khust district, who became the hieromonk Vikentii; the restored house was made a women's house, and he was its spiritual father^{1, 4}. In the year after the restoration the newly built church was consecrated by archimandrite Matfii (Vakarov)³. Pious girls came to the monastery from the surrounding villages and formed the first monastic community, and the first superior of the skete was the nun Kateryna (Kurytsia)⁴.

The skete belonged to the Chumaliv Ascension Convent³. In 1937 a wooden monastic block with a basement house-church was built here, and in 1954 a sewing workshop and an icon-painting workshop³.

The Soviet authorities kept the community under supervision: the house was burdened with taxes and most of its land was confiscated⁴. In the early 1950s the hieromonk Vikentii (Oros) was arrested and sentenced on a charge of cooperation with so-called "anti-people bands"; in 1955 he was released, and his rehabilitation was completed only in the early 1990s⁷. He had a direct part in the restoration and the founding of the sketes in Drahovo, Uhlia, Horodylovo and Iza⁴.

The sources give the time of the skete's closure differently: the Encyclopaedia of Modern Ukraine writes that 16 sisters lived in it up to its closure in 1958, the local-history study names 26 July 1960 as the date of liquidation, and the house's own site places the closure at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s^{1, 3, 4}. The premises were handed to the local collective farm, and the sisters were taken away to the Lypcha and Chumaliv monasteries³.

The collective farm, making no use of the buildings, passed them to a construction organisation that promised to set up a rest home here; the organisation did not meet its obligations, and destroyed the church instead¹. Two blocks were left of the house; they were given to the Khust hat factory, and the factory opened a pioneer camp on the monastery grounds¹.

In those same years the communist press of the region printed anti-religious letters by former nuns; among them was a letter by Pelahiia Vovchok, a former nun of the Drahovo monastery⁶.

On 17 December 1989 a general assembly of the villagers considered a petition from a group of believers for the restoration of the women's monastery and resolved to ask the Khust District Executive Committee to return the former places of worship, which at that time belonged to the Khust felt-hat factory⁵. On 7 May 1990 bishop Yevfymii (Shutak), on behalf of the house's former nuns, applied to the chairman of the district executive committee for the monastery to be opened⁵.

A commission set up under the district council concluded that opening the monastery would not be effective: as of 1990 there were 6 sisters living in the monastery, while at the same time 400 children were on a health stay here at the pioneer camp "Potichok", 200 of them from the Chornobyl zone⁵. In spite of this, taking the citizens' petitions into account, by a decision of the Khust District Council of 28 September 1990 the felt-hat factory was permitted to hand over the former buildings of the monastery into the ownership of the eparchy⁵.

The Encyclopaedia of Modern Ukraine places the revival of the house in 1989, the monastery's own site in 1990^{1, 3}. The monastery was headed by hegumenia Mytrodora (Pop), and the sisters rebuilt the old structures, raised new residential blocks and built churches⁴. The house recovered its property without particular difficulty - unlike the monasteries in Lypcha, Iza and Domboky, whose property claims took a long time to settle⁵.

In 1990-1991 a chapel of the holy apostles Peter and Paul was built here - according to the Encyclopaedia of Modern Ukraine a temporary one, rebuilt in 2000 - in 1990-1993 the church of the holy Archangel Michael was raised, and in 1997 a new block was finished^{1, 3}. The house church of the icon of the Mother of God "the Life-giving Spring" is dated by the monastery's own site to 1999, and by the Encyclopaedia of Modern Ukraine to 1995, together with a three-storey residential block^{1, 3}.

On 29 July 1994 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, by journal no. 15, created the Khust eparchy, separating it from the Mukachevo eparchy and including the Khust district in the new eparchy⁸. On 29 January 2016 the Synod blessed the changing of the house's name in accordance with the new name of the eparchy and the adoption and registration of the monastery's Statute in a new redaction⁹.

Among the shrines of the house are the icons of the Mother of God "the Life-giving Spring" and the Iveron icon, and also particles of the relics of the venerable Kyiv-Pechersk fathers, a gift of Ioann (Siopko), bishop of Khust and Vynohradiv, in 2001^{2, 3}.

In 2011 the local historians Andrii Svitlynets and Serhii Kanaylo published in Uzhhorod a book about the monastery, which the reviewer called the first comprehensive study of the history of the house from the eighteenth century to the present day⁴. The authors found most of the documents in the holdings of the State Archive of the Zakarpattia Region, and also in the current archives of the Mukachevo and Khust eparchies, in the monastery's own archive and in private collections; the book draws on the recollections of nuns, of their relatives and of the inhabitants of the surrounding villages⁴. The book was published with the support of the then superior of the house, hegumenia Mytrodora (Pop); as of 2011 there were 16 sisters living in the monastery⁴.