Myltsi St. Nicholas's Monastery

The St Nicholas Monastery of Myltsi for men, of the Volodymyr-Volynsk eparchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, stands in the village of Myltsi in Volyn, on the western bank of the river Turiia; the services are celebrated in Church Slavonic^{8, 4}.

The academic sources speak differently about when the house was founded. The Encyclopaedia of the History of Ukraine takes as the oldest documentary mention a record of Prince Sangushko conveying his holdings to his wife Hanka, among them "monastyr S. Nikolaja Milcze"; researchers date the document before 1463 and hold that the prince is Sangushko Fedkovych, prince of Ratne and Kovel, who died in 1454 — so in that year the monastery already existed¹. The Encyclopaedia of Modern Ukraine is more cautious: the house probably existed from the end of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century, and it is mentioned in written sources in 1532 as functioning². The monastery's own account repeats the date of about 1463 and adds that its commemoration book gives the prince's monastic name, Ioakym³.

Until the end of the sixteenth century the house stood under the patronage of the Sangushko princes, by whose efforts it had become, by the middle of that century, one of the best known and wealthiest in Volyn; the endowment record made to the monastery in 1542 and the will of 1547 of Prince Fedir Andriyovych Sangushko bear witness to this¹. In 1533 that prince gave a receipt for taking the monastery into his charge in an exchange of lands with his own uncle³. In 1542 he completed the stone church in the house and issued it a charter for the independent holding of its lands³; according to the Encyclopaedia of Modern Ukraine the prince raised the stone church of St Nicholas in place of a wooden one and gave the monastery the surrounding villages with their lands, hayfields and lakes, while in 1636 Prince V.-D. Zaslavsky added six villages more².

For most of the first half of the seventeenth century the patrons of the house were the Zaslavsky princes, and the monastery kept its religious standing: its superior Yosyf (Chaplych-Shpanovsky) became bishop of Lutsk and Ostroh, and after him the Myltsi archimandrite chosen was a bishop of the same eparchy, later the Orthodox Metropolitan of Kyiv Dionisiy Balaban¹. The exact date of the house's passage to the Union is not known: from the manifestation of the Chełm Uniate bishop Yakiv Susha of 1682 it is clear that by that time the house was already Uniate, and that this happened under Archimandrite Stefan Hirchak¹. The Encyclopaedia of Modern Ukraine dates the accession to the Union to 1707 and the renaming as the Myltsi abbey to 1713². The inventory of the monastery's property made in the 1760s shows that the house remained rather wealthy¹.

In the 1830s, under the anti-Union policy of the time, the monastery was handed back to the Orthodox¹; the house's own account and the Encyclopaedia of Modern Ukraine give the year 1839^{3, 2}. In 1842 the estates granted by the Sangushko princes were taken away and subordinated to the ministry of state properties, and the house was to receive three and a half thousand roubles a year for its keep¹. The monastery received the status of a first-class house, whose establishment provided for an archimandrite, a deputy superior, eight hieromonks, four hierodeacons, three monks and, besides them, twenty-four servitors¹. At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, through the efforts of Archimandrite F. Shashkevych, a two-storey brotherhood block was raised, and in the cemetery a stone church in honour of St Onuphrius; a parish school and a theological college founded by Archimandrite Varlaam (Yaskulsky) were at work². In 1855 a warm church was built beside the brotherhood block². As of 1914 there were forty-two residents in the house, and in 1915 the monastery was evacuated to Kharkiv². From 1921 to 1939, when the western part of Volyn belonged to Poland, the house went on functioning as an Orthodox one^{1, 2}.

The Soviet authorities liquidated the monastery in October 1947¹; a psycho-neurological home for the elderly was placed on its grounds². The revival came at the beginning of the 1990s³; the Encyclopaedia of Modern Ukraine gives the year 1993².

The monastic close survives almost whole. The axial street runs from the holy gates in the southern link of the enclosure to the open space between the bell tower and the main church; not far from the gates stands the superior's house (beginning of the eighteenth century, rebuilt at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth), and further north stretches the brotherhood block (end of the eighteenth century), in whose middle part the warm Transfiguration church is arranged — at first, from 1855, that of the holy prince Alexander Nevsky — with facades in the pseudo-Russian manner⁴. The northern end of the block abuts the church of St Nicholas of Myra (1542), whose appearance joins in its own way the features of pre-Mongol Rus architecture and of Gothic; in the 1990s the remains of sixteenth-century frescoes were found in its altar, and in the early 2000s one of them was restored⁴. Twenty-five metres west of the church rises the bell tower (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries), and a kilometre to the south, in the cemetery, the monastery holds the church of St Onuphrius the Great (eighteenth century, its wooden domes from the second half of the nineteenth)⁴.

Among the shrines of the house is the image of St Nicholas of Myra, venerated in place of the ancient icon that was evacuated to Kharkiv in 1915, cleaned of its later layers in 1916 and dated to the sixteenth century, and lost in the Soviet period — and a cross with a particle of the relics of St Nicholas⁵. In the Transfiguration church is the grave of the schema-archimandrite Oleksiy (Filozof), who reposed on 20 February 2000: in the 1940s he was a resident of this monastery, later laboured in other houses and became known as an experienced spiritual father, and in 2001 the coffin with his remains was brought here from the place of his first burial⁵. The house keeps the Transfiguration of the Lord on 19 August, the memory of St Nicholas of Myra on 22 May and 19 December, and the memory of St Onuphrius the Great on 25 June⁶.

The monastery has a skete of its own — that of St John the Baptist in the village of Verbka, Kovel raion⁷. From 1997 a skete of the Nativity of the holy Prophet John the Baptist worked in the village of Kraska, Ratne raion, and in 2001 it was moved to Verbka⁷; there a church of the Nativity of John the Baptist was arranged, ready by 2007, and a church of St Seraphim of Sarov from 2010^{7, 2}.