Entry of the Mother of God Convent

The Entry of the Mother of God Convent of the Nizhyn eparchy stands in Nizhyn in the Chernihiv region, in the former suburb of Avdiivka, which was settled from the seventeenth century onward and bears the name of its first inhabitant³. The convent's historic ground is a town block running from west to east; the greater part of it has been returned to the Church, while the rest remains secular².

Sources place the convent's foundation in the second half of the seventeenth century. According to the research of Archbishop Filaret (Humilevskyi) of Chernihiv, it was founded by Hanna Bryslavska, widow of a colonel of Starodub: wishing to devote the rest of her life to prayer for the soul of her late husband, she bought a plot of land and raised around her own dwelling cells for the old and the poor, together with two churches - of the Entry of the Mother of God and of the Prophet Elijah^{1, 5}.

From 1747 to 1758 the convent was headed by Abbess Elevferiia, grandmother of the notable Nizhyn Greek Ivan Ternaviot. Under her, in 1756, the house suffered from a fire that broke out next door, and the renewal of the convent began the following year. Through the second half of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth, the convent's principal buildings, wooden until then, were replaced with masonry ones¹.

The single-domed Entry church, executed in the Ukrainian baroque style, is dated to the 70s and 80s of the eighteenth century; the convent's own site notes that different sources give 1770, 1778, 1780 and 1788, while the eparchial essay names 1778 as the year of consecration^{2, 5}. The earlier church of the same dedication, built by Hanna Bryslavska, was wooden and burned down in 1756².

By the northern stretch of the wall, north-west of the Entry church, a three-tier brick bell tower was raised in 1814^{2, 5}. Two older wooden churches of the Prophet Elijah stood east of the Entry church: one was put up under Hanna Bryslavska, the other in 1757².

In 1863 a hostel for pilgrims, a school for girls and workshops of icon painting and wood carving for the making of iconostases were established at the convent¹. These workshops filled orders for Ukrainian monasteries and parish churches, among them the Yeletsky monastery in Chernihiv and the St Elijah church in Kyiv⁵. At the beginning of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878 the school was abolished and its premises given over to a military hospital¹.

The nuns were skilled in gold embroidery: in the 1860s, on the commission of Archbishop Filaret of Chernihiv, they restored objects from the eparchial vestry of Chernihiv, and in the early 1870s they made a shroud for the church of the Prophet Elijah in Kyiv¹. Having their own chapel at the Nizhyn railway station, the nuns offered at a kiosk there the small bags, gold-sewn slippers and purses they had made, while well-to-do parents ordered dowries for their daughters at the convent⁵.

The community of earlier days is attested by a book carrying the written biography of one of the nuns, which survived the turmoil of the twentieth century and was sent to the convent; the eparchial essay quotes that entry word for word. From it Iryna Fedchenkova (1856-1956) is known, who entered the convent in 1868 and was tonsured on 19 October 1897 by Archimandrite Hermogen⁵.

The fullest memory preserved is that of Abbess Smaragda - in the world Iuliania Avramivna Onyshchenko - who was born in 1858 in the village of Markivtsi in the Kozelets district of the Chernihiv province, into a Cossack family. When the girl was seven her father died; she was often ill, and her mother, not expecting her daughter to live, had a coffin made ready for her⁶.

On the advice of the local priest her mother took her to the school for orphan girls at the Entry convent in Nizhyn, and, by the abbess's own recollection, the only property she had with her was that coffin. Of those years she recalled: "In the convent I received both an upbringing and an education... I learned drawing, knitting, embroidery, painter's work, painting, singing, reading..."⁶.

After the school Uliana Onyshchenko entered the convent as a novice, was tonsured, and in time was given the obedience of dean nun. In 1914, after the death of Abbess Valentyna, the sisters unanimously elected the dean nun as their new superior; on becoming abbess she did not move into the superior's quarters but stayed in her former monastic cell and worked on equal terms with the sisters⁶.

In 1922, during the Bolshevik campaign to seize church valuables, Abbess Smaragda was arrested. According to the eparchial life of her, the investigator pressed her for testimony against the sisters and the clergy, while she sought to turn the anger of the authorities away from the convent, which then had two hundred nuns⁶.

The same life relates that after many hours of interrogation, torture and beating the abbess died, that the nuns were allowed to take the body, and that when she was brought to the convent for burial she revived; the next morning the confessor was taken back to prison. The court of the Revolutionary Tribunal, held on 13 May 1922 in Chernihiv, sentenced her to three years of imprisonment⁶.

On the final Soviet closure of the convent the sources differ: the convent's site and the eparchial historical essay name 1936^{1, 5}, while the eparchial life of Abbess Smaragda names 1927, when, on its account, the churches and premises were handed over as an artillery store, the nuns were forced to disperse to their homes, and eighty elderly nuns headed by the abbess were resettled to the St George monastery in Kozelets⁶.

In 1930 Abbess Smaragda was arrested a second time, on this occasion on a charge of anti-Soviet agitation; the investigation established no offence and she was released, but her health was broken. She settled with four sisters in a private flat in Kozelets⁶.

When the first opportunity to open churches came, Abbess Smaragda and the sisters returned to the convent: in the autumn of 1941 the Entry cathedral was opened, its windows, doors and iconostasis made by the sisters and the worshippers, eighteen nuns gathered at the convent, and the convent's priest, Archpriest Vasyl Buhaievskyi, began to serve regularly⁶. The convent's site and the eparchial essay give these events differently: on their account a parish was formed here in 1941 and was later liquidated^{1, 5}.

In September 1943 the convent was closed again, and Abbess Smaragda moved to Chernihiv, settling not far from the Trinity-Illinsky convent. Foreseeing her approaching death, she asked to be buried in the monastic cemetery and for the coffin to be laid shallow, because it would have to be moved twice. Abbess Smaragda died on 10 January 1945⁶.

In 1969 the city authorities of Chernihiv resolved to close the monastic cemetery and lay out a park in its place, and relatives were offered the transfer of the bodies of the dead to the newly opened Yalivshchyna cemetery. According to the eparchial life of her, when the nuns of the closed Trinity convent of Chernihiv, headed by Abbess Amvrosiia (Ivanenko), opened the coffin, the body was found incorrupt⁶.

On 16 November 2011, with the blessing of Metropolitan Volodymyr of Kyiv and All Ukraine, the honourable remains of Abbess Smaragda were moved from Yalivshchyna to the grounds of the Nizhyn Entry convent⁶. On 8 May 2012 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, having examined the life and the labours of the ascetic, blessed her local glorification, approved her iconographic image and the drafts of a troparion and a kontakion, and resolved that her remains be regarded as holy relics⁸.

On 3 May 2014 the celebration of the glorification of the venerable Smaragda of Nizhyn, the confessor, took place at the Entry convent in Nizhyn: the Divine Liturgy was led by the Chancellor of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Antoniy of Boryspil and Brovary, and an assembly of bishops performed the rite of glorification among the locally venerated saints of the Nizhyn eparchy⁹. The Nizhyn eparchy calls the venerable Smaragda the holy patroness of the city, and her incorrupt relics rest in the convent's main church, where a hierarchical liturgy is served on the day of her commemoration¹⁰.

The revival of the convent began in 1998¹. By that year the house had become, in the eparchial essay's words, "a ruin, a rubbish tip and a thicket"⁵. On 12 March 1998 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, having heard the report of Metropolitan Antoniy of Chernihiv and Nizhyn, blessed the opening of the Holy Entry Convent in Nizhyn, Chernihiv region⁷.

The convent is enclosed by a brick wall: its old stretches, of the turn of the 1840s and 1850s, have partly survived along the edges of the block, while the new ones, raised at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, stand where the old ones were lost and separate the convent from the secular plot. In the middle of the western stretch is the Holy Gate, from which a straight avenue leads to the Entry church².

North of the Entry church a two-storey block was set up in 1998-2000 on the ruins of the refectory church of the Prophet Elijah; that church itself appeared at the start of the nineteenth century, and in 1846-1850 it was enlarged with a chapel of the Holy Myrrh-bearing Women. South-west of the Entry church a two-storey abbess's building was put up in 2006-2008².

On the secular part of the block, south of the Entry church, stretches a large three-storey building: its lower and middle floors were raised in 1857, while the upper one was added in the Soviet period, when the building was given over to civilian flats; these exist to this day, apart from a few rooms allotted to the convent in the late 1990s².

Among the convent's treasures are a copy of the Tolga icon of the Mother of God dated to the sixteenth century, given in 2000 by Abbess Varvara of the Tolga convent, a native of the Chernihiv region, and a copy of the icon of the Mother of God "It Is Truly Meet", painted on Athos in 1885 and given in 2002⁴. At the request of those who cannot come to Nizhyn, the sisters have travelled with the Tolga icon to Kyiv, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia and other places in Ukraine⁵.