Neshcheriv Transfiguration Monastery

The Transfiguration monastery for men stands in the village of Nescheriv, in Obukhiv district in the Kyiv region, at the stone church of the Transfiguration of the Lord^{1, 2}.

The church was built in 1794 by a landowner, Ivan Pavlovych Hudym-Levkovych; besides the main altar it had side chapels of St Paul the Confessor, of the equal-to-the-apostles protomartyr Thekla, and of the Beheading of John the Baptist². The Hudym-Levkovych family was a known one in the Kyiv region: its founder Petro Levkovych, nicknamed Hudyma, came from Serbia, was a Kyiv burgomaster in the second half of the seventeenth century, and in 1692 raised a stone church of the prophet Elijah on the Podil in Kyiv, on the site of the first chronicled church of that same name, mentioned under the year 944². The builder of the Nescheriv church himself was a Kyiv sotnyk from 1772 and, when the company was abolished in 1782, became marshal of the nobility of the Kyiv uyezd; after his death he was buried beside the Transfiguration church he had built².

The church of the Transfiguration is a distinctive monument of architecture³. Its rectangular body has no projecting altar apse; the drum of the pear-shaped dome is set off to the east and slightly sunk into the high four-pitched roof with its break; the eastern half of the church has tall vaulted windows in a single tier, and the western half vaulted and square windows in two³. At the level of the second tier, in the south-west corner of the building, a belfry is fitted, and what makes it unusual is that it does not project beyond the facades³.

In the Soviet period the church of the Transfiguration fell into neglect, and in the 1990s the revival of the shrine began². In 2004 a country skete of the Kyiv Holy Trinity Ioninsky monastery arose at the church, and by Journal No. 2 of 9 March 2005 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church gave its blessing for an independent monastery for men to open here^{1, 2}.

Through the efforts of both houses and with the participation of benefactors the church was restored; besides the main altar, a second was brought back, that of the Beheading of John the Baptist². At the monastery's expense stone crosses in memory of the church's ktitors were put up beside it, and a stone chapel in the form of an apse for services in the open air; not far off stand two monastery blocks, built at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as houses for the church clergy³. On 11 September 2018, the day of the patronal feast, the Divine Liturgy in the house was led by His Beatitude Onufriy, Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine⁵. The patronal feasts of the monastery are the Transfiguration of the Lord, 6 (19) August, and the Beheading of the Precious Head of John the Baptist, 29 August (11 September)⁴.