Starobelsk "Joy of All Who Sorrows" Icon of the Mother of God Convent

The house at Starobilsk in the Luhansk region was founded in 1849 by Anna Ivanivna Bulych, the widow of a shtabs-captain: having sold the family estate, she bought a derelict homestead on the southern edge of the town and opened in it a shelter for elderly widows and for orphans from clergy families¹. In 1851 a house church was consecrated within the shelter¹. When Anna Bulych's means ran out, at her own petition the shelter was in 1862 turned into a women's community of monastic type, and in 1863 the foundress herself was tonsured a rassophore nun with the name Anhelina and set at the head of the community¹.

Between 1863 and 1870 the community built on its grounds a winter church of the Holy Trinity with a side-altar of the Transfiguration and cells adjoining it, and in 1886 the community was raised to a monastery¹. The large stone church in honour of the icon of the Mother of God "Joy of All Who Sorrows", with side-altars in the name of the Not-Made-by-Hands Image of the Saviour on the right and of St Nicholas of Myra on the left, was raised in two stages, from 1871 to 1873 and from 1894 to 1899¹; a regional study of the architectural heritage of the Starobilsk country notes that the monastery's main church took 28 years to build³. The same dedications - the Holy Trinity, the Transfiguration, the Not-Made-by-Hands Image and St Nicholas of Myra - recur among the patronal feasts the house itself lists². The two-tier gate belfry of 1870 has been lost¹.

By the same study, in 1890 the monastery held 300 nuns, novices not counted, and during the First World War an infirmary was opened here for typhus-stricken wounded soldiers whom the doctors had refused to tend³.

The house's own site places its closure in the years 1918 to 1922¹; the same study dates the dispersal of the community to 1924 and adds that some of the sisters perished or were among those arrested³. Before the war Polish prisoners of war were held here, and after the war military units were quartered on the grounds¹.

The revival of the monastery began in 1992: the church of the Holy Trinity with its cells was returned to the Church first, and then the remaining buildings¹; a year later, as the same study writes, the house began to function again³. In 1999 the repair of the main church was begun¹.

In 2013 the house's own site named among its holy things the venerated icon of the Mother of God "Joy of All Who Sorrows"⁴. In the same year, on 5 January, the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, having considered the reorganisation of church administration within the Luhansk region, referred Starobilsk district to the Severodonetsk Diocese, and its diocesan bishop was to continue to be styled "Severodonetsk and Starobilsk"⁵.