Tryhirya Transfiguration Monastery

The earliest known mention of the Tryhiria monastery is an entry in the Ostroh Chronicle under the year 1611: "By God's grace the Tryhirsky monastery began... on the river Teteriv, of the Transfiguration of the Saviour, by Father Kyrylo, hegumen of Liubar"¹. The monastery still stands on the rocky bank of the Teteriv⁸ in the village of Tryhiria in the Zhytomyr region⁵ and belongs to the Zhytomyr eparchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church⁷.

Its own records spoke of an earlier beginning. The old synodicon placed the foundation in 1583 and ascribed it to "Prince Volodymyr of Zhytomyr", though the monastery itself notes that at the end of the 16th century there was no prince in Zhytomyr; the Inventory of 1775 likewise traced the beginning "to the times of Volodymyr, prince of Zhytomyr", adding that the house was later burned by enemies and, "after no small time", revived in 1613 by the Voronych nobles¹. The monastery's historiographer Anatolii Malevych proposed in 1898 that the prince meant was Volodymyr Olherdovych, who ruled the Kyivan appanage together with Zhytomyr in 1362-1394¹. The Inventory also contains a copy of a charter of Mykola Voronych of 1613: Kyrylo, hegumen of the Liubar house, asked him for land to establish a new hermitage monastery, and the request was granted¹. The 1854 "Record of the Tryhirsky Transfiguration Monastery" names as its founders in 1613 the landowners of the Troianiv estate, Mykola and Feodir Oleksandrovych Voronych, while tradition holds that the first settlements of hermit monks arose here around 1575, when hegumen Kyrylo moved to this place from Liubar⁹.

In 1644 Petro Mohyla, Metropolitan of Kyiv, wrote in his book "Lithos": "Look at the cenobitic Tryhirsky monastery, and there you will see up to 80 monks living in great humility and strict discipline"¹. During the Khmelnytsky era the house was devastated: the Tryhirya hegumen Nykyfor Onushkevych left an entry in the Zhytomyr act books recording that attackers turned the monastery into ruins in 1651¹; one of the raids is dated to 13 October of that year⁹.

In the first half of the 18th century the monastery became Uniate. It ran not only a Latin but also a Ruthenian school, and from 1777 it maintained a charitable hospital¹; in the Uniate period the brotherhood did not exceed ten by the middle of the century⁹. In 1782, on the site of the wooden cells, the Lviv architect Johann Schneider built - or substantially rebuilt - a stone fraternal building under superior Adrian Shubovych; because of the slope it has one storey on the north side and two on the south². In 1792 a wooden single-domed church of the icon of the Mother of God "Joy of All Who Sorrow" was raised in the old cemetery, later renamed for the Holy Myrrh-bearing Women⁹.

In 1839 the monastery returned to Orthodoxy. The local hegumen Leontiy Skybovsky travelled in 1839-1841 to numerous parishes of the Zhytomyr and Kyiv regions, where he tactfully resolved misunderstandings about Orthodox services, and in that same year of 1839 he was raised to the rank of archimandrite¹; by 1841 the supporters of the union had left the house⁹. He also rebuilt the monastery: in 1837 he added to the Transfiguration church the side-chapels of St Nicholas of Myra and St Basil the Great²; in 1848-1852 he raised a heated stone Theophany church, consecrated on 27 July 1852⁹; and in 1854 he began building a new stone Transfiguration church. He died at Tryhiria in 1868, five years before its completion in 1873, and it is now the monastery's main cathedral church^{2, 9}. In the 1920s a Tryhiria resident, Mykola Antonenko, painted the murals of the Transfiguration church, and they survive to this day².

During the First World War the house sheltered evacuated members of the Spiritual Council of the Pochaiv Lavra¹. In the 1930s the monastery was abolished: a warehouse was installed in the stone Transfiguration church and a village school in the fraternal building; in 1939 the Theophany church was destroyed¹, and with it the church of the Myrrh-bearing Women⁹. In 1941 the Transfiguration church opened as a parish and functioned as such until 1990, when the fraternal building was returned to the Church, and in 1993, as the monastery itself testifies, the parish was turned into a monastery^{1, 9}.

The chief holy object of the house is the Tryhirska icon of the Mother of God, a copy of the "Chernihiv-Illinsky" image³. An 1890 publication quoted by the monastery recorded: "Here is an icon of the Mother of God to which the inhabitants of the whole eastern half of the Volyn eparchy flock with particular devotion"³. The archives hold a report by Archimandrite Dosifei for the year 1867 on the healing before this icon of a mute young man, Pavlo Husynsky, who came to the house as a wanderer and remained in it³; through the years of persecution the faithful preserved the icon, and in 1941 it returned to the monastery³. On 25 September 2018 the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, by its journal no. 26, resolved to glorify the Tryhirska icon of the Mother of God and to establish its feast on 7/20 August, entering it in the church calendar; the basis was the decision of the Commission for the Canonisation of Saints, protocol no. 6 of 13 September 2018⁶. The icon stands in the Transfiguration church of the house in a specially made case under a silver riza⁸. In September 2019 it was carried among seven wonder-working icons of the Zhytomyr region during a cross procession through the streets of Zhytomyr¹⁰.

The monastery's patronal feasts are the Transfiguration of the Lord on 6 (19) August and the Theophany on 6 (19) January⁴. On 7 October 2025 a new church in the name of St Spyridon of Trimythous was consecrated here, the rite being led by the ruling bishop of the Zhytomyr eparchy¹¹.