Mikhnivka Meeting of the Lord Convent

The Mikhnivka Meeting of the Lord Convent stands at Mykhnivka in Volyn. The settlement on this spot was founded at the beginning of the seventeenth century by the Volhynian nobleman Filon Yelovytskyi; it later took the name Filoniv, and the Polish king Vladislaus IV granted the town Magdeburg rights¹. A Volhynian local-history account dates that privilege to 1637².

In 1642 a wooden church of the Meeting of the Lord was built here, and in 1647 a monastery for men was opened at it. An icon-painting school worked at the house, and the work of the Mykhnivka masters is kept today in the Museum of the Volyn Icon in Lutsk².

The town ceased to exist in 1842: its last owner, the landowner S. Piotroshevskyi, evicted about five hundred inhabitants for refusing to perform corvée labour¹. Three villages arose on those lands - Vydrychi, Kozel and Teklyne - and the church of the Meeting of the Lord was left standing alone among the fields².

Since 1996 a monastic community has lived at that church again, this time a women's one². According to the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine, as of 2018 forty of the more than sixty inhabitants of Mykhnivka were sisters of the convent¹.

Between 2016 and 2026 the vicar bishops of the Volyn eparchy performed four monastic and inokini tonsures at the house^{3, 4, 5, 6}.