Rykhly Desert St. Nicholas's Convent

Rykhly Desert St. Nicholas's Convent stands in the village of Rykhly in the Korop district of the Chernihiv region and belongs to the Nizhyn diocese. The house occupies a headland of a high plateau in the middle of an old oak wood: deep ravines surround it on three sides, and on the north a narrow neck joins the monastery grounds to the rest of the plateau. The Great Ukrainian Encyclopaedia calls this the highest point in the landscape of the Chernihiv region, at an absolute elevation of 212 metres¹.

A first wooden church of St Nicholas is known here from 1585, and in 1620, according to the same encyclopaedia, a wild-bee keeper from the village of Obolonnia found a wonderworking icon of St Nicholas at his apiary¹. It is that year the Nizhyn diocese marked as the beginning of the house: on 29 August 2020 a solemn service was held here for the 400th anniversary of the monastery's founding².

By the monastery's own tradition, the bee keeper carried the image home three times and three times found it back on the same maple; the people of the surrounding villages then set a chapel on the spot, and later a wooden church³. The same tradition explains the name: a sick priest from Obolonnia, reproached in a dream by the saint for his negligence, begged to be taken to the wonderworking icon "rykhlo" - Polish for "quickly" - and the word stayed with the image and with the church³.

The first documentary mention of the hermitage falls in 1654: a description of the towns of Ukraine names, on the old hill fort, a hermitage with a wooden church dedicated to St Nicholas the Wonderworker, inhabited by the black priest Yevstafii and the black elder Prokhor³.

On the founding of the monastery itself the sources do not agree. The Great Ukrainian Encyclopaedia places it in 1666 and ascribes it to the Chernihiv colonel and later hetman Damian Mnohohrishnyi and his brother Vasyl, with the blessing of Bishop Lazar Baranovych of Chernihiv¹; the Brockhaus and Efron dictionary of 1899 names as founders, in the same year, Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytskyi and his brother Vasyl⁴.

The house itself prints two charters of Mnohohrishnyi - of 13 January and 19 April 1669 - by which the hetman endowed the newly founded Rykhly house with land near Ponornytsia and named his own brother Vasyl Ihnatovych as his authorised representative in the affairs of the holy place³.

By the diocesan account the brothers gave the monastery fields, lakes, five mills, hayfields, a ferry on the Desna and the village of Budyshche, while the gate church of St John the Forerunner with its belfry was built at his own cost by Hetman Ivan Samoilovych⁵. The house was also looked after by Hetman Ivan Skoropadskyi, who by the monastery's tradition was healed of a grave illness at prayer before the wonderworking image, and by Hetman Danylo Apostol, who commissioned a costly revetment for the icon³.

The first masonry buildings were raised in 1743 at the cost of the brigadiers Fedir Kachenovskyi and Petro Chyzhevskyi, singers of the Court Choir Chapel in St Petersburg, who received their nobility from Empress Elizabeth Petrovna¹. The house's own history adds that Kachenovskyi took the monastery under his patronage in 1742 and gathered considerable means for the building work, including donations from the empress herself³.

The sources date the devastating fire differently: the diocese and the house itself place it in 1745, when the churches and the cells burned and only the gate church survived, to which the wonderworking icon was carried^{5, 3}; the encyclopaedia dates the fire to 1754¹. The main cathedral of St Nicholas was founded in 1754 and consecrated in 1760¹.

The cathedral was three-altar, cruciform, nine-part and five-domed, with side chapels of St Barbara and of Saints Zechariah and Elizabeth - by the encyclopaedia's account, a mark of the founders' gratitude to the empress¹. The singularity of its silhouette gave rise to the supposition that the court architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli had a hand in the design³; the diocesan account speaks of the cathedral plainly as built to Rastrelli's plan⁵.

The warm church of St Theodore Stratelates was raised in 1749 and rebuilt and enlarged in 1817; the gate church of St John the Forerunner with its belfry was built in 1767; the small church of St Nicholas on the headland, on the place where the icon appeared, was built in 1750 and rebuilt after the fire in 1757¹. In the Theodore church, by the house's own account, its benefactor Kachenovskyi was buried⁶.

In 1786, when the transfer of monasteries to a fixed state establishment threatened the house with closure, the governor general Count Petro Rumiantsev-Zadunaiskyi wrote to Empress Catherine II that the monastery church was one of the best in these parts and would always be a great ornament in an empty country; the request was granted³.

In 1820 the superior, Archimandrite Melkhisedek, introduced a new and stricter rule in the house³. In the 1820s the hieromonk Vasylii (Kyshkin), venerated by the Church among the saints, lived here for a time³.

On 29 September 1826 the hierodeacon Ioannykii (Holovanytskyi) transferred to the Rykhly monastery from the Hlynsk hermitage and became its treasurer⁷. Denunciations by the then superior Anastasii cost him the post: by a decree of 25 January 1829 Ioannykii was moved to the Domnytsia monastery under the strictest supervision, where he spent two years and ten months⁷.

In September 1832 he was returned to the house and on 16 September confirmed as its superior, and at that news the brethren who had scattered under Anastasii began coming back⁷. After eight years of governance a Synod decree of 6 August 1840 transferred him as superior to the Peter and Paul monastery with elevation to the rank of archimandrite; he later became the well-known Hlynsk elder, Schema-Archimandrite Iliodor⁷.

In the 1890s a novice of the Rykhly monastery was the future venerable Lavrentii of Chernihiv - Luka Proskura, a native of the neighbouring village of Karylske³. He was made precentor of the brethren's choir, and the singing in the house won such fame that precentors from elsewhere came to hear it⁸. Bishop Antonii of Chernihiv, having visited the monastery, called Luka to Chernihiv; the house itself places this move in the third year of his novitiate, while the diocesan life places it about 1905^{3, 8}. The monastery keeps chant notations copied in the ascetic's own hand³.

At thirteen Ioann Medvediev also came here - the future Schema-Archimandrite Feofan, venerated with the epithet of Rykhly⁹. His first obedience was to wake the brethren for prayer: small and quick, he ran round the monastic cells with a hand bell; later he worked in the monastery's prosphora bakery, at the apiary, in the bindery and in the monastery shop⁹. In 1912 Archimandrite Yevhenii tonsured him a monk with the name Iuvenalii, and in 1920 he was ordained a hieromonk⁹.

By 1897 there were 182 monks in the monastery⁴. On the eve of 1917 the house had five stone churches and many buildings³.

In 1922 the Chernihiv provincial department of public education repeatedly and unsuccessfully raised the question of protecting the Rykhly tract as a monument of nature¹. In the same year, on 16 December, the monastery was closed and a children's home was set up on its grounds^{5, 3}. Feofan, who lived through those days in the house, remembered how half-undressed monks were driven from their cells and the clergy were marched to Korop and then to Krolevets⁹.

On 18 December 1922, on the eve of the patronal feast, the brethren of the house were shot¹¹. The diocese cites a documentary trace: on 12 August of that year the revolutionary tribunal in Krolevets sentenced two monks, Yevhen Matvieiev and Mytrofan Radchenko, to be shot, but the Supreme Tribunal did not confirm the death sentence¹⁰.

By the popular tradition which the same diocese passes on, for disobeying the order to close the monastery the men of the Krolevets department of the State Political Directorate stripped the monks to their undercassocks, drove them barefoot through the frost to Krolevets, led them into the wood and shot them there in secret; people buried them where they fell, and how many there were remains unknown - by some accounts 112, by others 135¹¹.

Two years later a spring broke out in Popova Dolyna, where the killing took place, and was named Popova Krynytsia; on 2 May 2018 a newly built chapel was consecrated over it, and in the following year a Divine Liturgy was celebrated on the spot, in the Krolevets district of the Sumy region¹⁰. On 10 May 2023, on the centenary of the shooting, the liturgy in the memorial church to the killed monks was led by the vicar bishop of the Nizhyn diocese¹¹.

In 1930 the cathedral, the gate church with its belfry and the churches of St Nicholas and St Theodore were destroyed with explosives, even the cathedral's foundations being taken apart for building material, and the brick of the destroyed buildings paved the road from the Rykhly tract to Ponornytsia¹. In the middle of the 1930s the Rykhly wood was felled: in the first quarter of 1934 alone 12,000 cubic metres of timber were carried away⁵. In the 1950s pigsties were set up in the southern part of the monastery grounds¹, and in the Soviet period the village of Rykhly grew up right against the northern boundary of the monastery's guest yard³.

The ruins of the ensemble were studied in 1957 by Mykola Tsapenko, who recorded its general plan, and in 1976 and 1989 by Viktor Vecherskyi¹. The surviving structures are entered in the Corpus of Monuments of History and Culture of Ukraine, but not in the State Register of Immovable Monuments; the natural tract of Rykhly Dacha was declared a reserve in 1984¹.

Of the ensemble there remain, in a ruined state, three single-storey masonry blocks of cells and the guest yard: the eastern block was built in 1817, the north-eastern in 1743, and the north-western in two stages, in 1743 and 1842¹. The Great Ukrainian Encyclopaedia judges the lost ensemble a masterpiece of Ukrainian baroque architecture¹.

On 3 May 2004 Bishop Amvrosii (Polikopa) of Chernihiv and Nizhyn decided to found a religious community on the grounds of the former monastery, and on 21 May of the same year the first Divine Liturgy was served in the open air⁵. On 13 July 2006 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, by journal No 32, blessed the opening of the monastery in the village of Rykhly in the Korop district of the Chernihiv region¹². In the following year, on 31 May 2007, the Synod divided the Chernihiv diocese: by journal No 58 the Nizhyn diocese was formed, and the Korop district was assigned to it¹³.

By a decision of the Synod of 28 July 2019, journal No 22, the men's monastery was reorganised as a convent^{14, 15}. The first tonsures of nuns in the revived house were performed on 27 March 2020¹⁶.

The new masonry church of St Nicholas was under construction from 2007⁶. On 7 August 2021 Metropolitan Kliment of Nizhyn and Pryluky consecrated the rebuilt church, served the first Divine Liturgy in it and blessed a cross set up in memory of the pious builders and benefactors of the house¹⁷.

The house today stretches from north to south across three historic yards - the main, the guest and the service yard - which, as the headland falls away gently, lie at different heights, like the steps of a great landscape staircase⁶. On the sites of the destroyed churches - the gate church, the main church of St Nicholas and the warm church of the Nativity - stand wooden memorial crosses, and the building of the former village school, closed for want of children of school age in Rykhly, has been handed over to the monastery⁶.

Near the house there survive two caves dug into the earth, the "old" and the "new", which by the monastery's tradition were the first dwelling of the hermits here; the entrances to both are in the slopes of deep ravines¹⁸. In one of the ravines to the south-west of the village there is a venerated water spring¹⁸.

Among the holy things of the house is an old copy of the wonderworking Rykhly icon of St Nicholas; of the fate of the original itself after the closure of the monastery the house writes that it is not established¹⁹. The Nizhyn diocese each year keeps a local commemoration of St Nicholas in the Dormition church of Korop, in remembrance of the appearing of the Rykhly image and of the town's deliverance from cholera²⁰; the diocesan account places that deliverance in 1848, when the icon was brought from the monastery to Korop and carried in procession around the settlement⁵.

The house church keeps a wonderworking copy of the Image of the Saviour Not Made by Hands, one of the chief holy things of the pre-revolutionary monastery²¹. By the diocesan account, after the destruction of the house the icon belonged to the venerable Feofan of Rykhly, after the elder's death it passed to his disciple, the future dean of the Korop district Archimandrite Mykolai (Putria), and a few years ago it returned to the revived monastery²¹.