Nativity of the Most Holy Mother of God Monastery

The house in Cherkasy began not as a monastery but as a metochion of another monastery. On 9 April 1901 the Cherkasy townsmen Ivan Kryvokobylsky and Stefan Romodan petitioned the Holy Synod to accept as a gift the land belonging to them, for the building in Cherkasy of a metochion and a church — dedicated precisely to the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God¹. By a Synod decree of 3 May 1901, No. 2956, the case was passed to the Kyiv Consistory, and what it concerned was a chapel and a metochion of the Zhabotyn St Onuphrius Monastery¹.

Permission came in an imperial decree of 11 August 1902, No. 2003, addressed to Feognost, Metropolitan of Kyiv and Halych: the Zhabotyn monastery was allowed to set up a metochion and a church in Cherkasy, and on the donated land to raise a house with a temporary chapel in one half and quarters for the brethren in the other¹. The land lay on Bulvarna street¹. On 6 March 1903 the city council resolved to add about four thousand square sazhens more, and by then the church already stood half built¹.

The consecration was set for 5 November 1906 in the old style¹ — 18 November in the new². The rite of the great consecration of the Kazan church and of the monastery metochion was performed by the vicar of the Kyiv eparchy, Bishop Platon (Rozhdestvensky) of Chyhyryn².

By 1909 the metochion held 1,908 square sazhens of its own land — 1,133 from donors and 675 from the city administration — besides rented land¹. The inventory of its buildings lists a stone church 33 arshins long and 14 wide, two blocks for the brethren, a house for pilgrims, a stable with two storerooms and a stone cellar with a shed above it¹.

In February 1923 the monastery and the metochion were abolished by a decision of the Kyiv liquidation committee, and the buildings and property were requisitioned for the state¹. Under Soviet rule the house was closed².

During the German occupation the resumption of liturgical life on what was left of the house was permitted². The refectory of the brethren was adapted as a church and consecrated to the Nativity of the Mother of God — in memory of the church that had stood by the former Hay Market and was destroyed during the retreat of Soviet troops in 1941².

On 13 July 2006 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church blessed the transformation of the men's monastery of the Nativity of the Mother of God in Cherkasy into a women's one⁴. The house is still called a men's monastery — so its own website names it³.

The house counts its foundation from 1906: on 18 November 2020 it kept its one hundred and fourteenth anniversary². The same day stands in its list of honoured feasts as the day of the house's foundation, the patronal feast remains the Nativity of the Mother of God on 21 September, and the Kazan icon, to which the metochion's first church was dedicated, is remembered there twice a year³.