Secrets of the Intermontaine Church
A secret. A still-unfathomed spiritual majesty is hidden in the name of the main Spaska (Our Savior’s) Church, as well as of the whole Mezhyhirsky (Intermontane) Monastery. Taras Shevchenko, and not only he, used to write about it. Let us recall only two now forgotten publications: Kyiv Mezhyhirska Common Nunnery of Our Savior’s Transfiguration by Stryzhevsky (1899) and Mezhigore by Dobrovolsky (1903).
I obtained an interesting manuscript, Synodic or a Prayer Book of the Mezhyhirsky Convent begun while the nunnery still existed and continued even after it was destroyed. The cloister’s clerk, after rescuing this official publication from the flames, continued to keep the record so that posterity would remember the institution’s glorious past and its donors.
It is Taras Shevchenko who retold the monastery’s first mystery, the legend of its destruction. The popular tale, so full of the mystical in its interweaving of fact and fiction, says that Russian tsars had always looked with disfavor on the Mezhyhirska convent. Peter I tried to cancel the convent’s stavrolygia (self-rule) granted in 1601, when Kyiv monasteries entered into a union with the Roman Catholics. In response, Hetman Ivan Mazepa refused to subordinate the convent to the bishop of Chernihiv, transferring it instead to the Kyiv St. Sophia’s Orthodox Metropolitan who did not recognize the Moscow patriarch’s jurisdiction.
Catherine II, who considered the convent a bulwark of independent Ukrainian Orthodoxy, decided to do away with it. Twice, on April 2 and 10, 1786, the empress ordered priests to transfer the cloister to Southern Ukraine. And twice the order went unfulfilled. The empress decided to go personally to the convent and traveled to Kyiv, where she announced in the nearby village of Dzvonky that she would visit it someday. A day before she came, the convent caught fire, which gutted most of the structures and property. When Shevchenko visited Mezhyhore in 1843, he heard a legend that the convent was allegedly destroyed by order of the empress and that General Field Marshal Potemkin, who, for political reasons, had signed up for the Cossack force under the nickname of Nechosa, was implicated. For many years Kyiv was still rife with rumors about the fire, which the monarch watched from a ship in the Dnipro.
The second mystery is that the Mezhyhirsky Cloister once housed the library of Prince Yaroslav the Wise. This subject has been debated by Kyiv journalists ever since Ukraine proclaimed independence. Without confirming or denying this supposition, let us still claim that the second mystery is apparently linked with the first, the arson of the convent. The cloister, founded by Prince Andriy Bogoliubsky (lover of God), could indeed have kept a collection of Kyivan princes’ manuscripts. Yet, even if this collection existed, it perished without a trace. This hypothesis is confirmed by the role the monastery played in educational and cultural life during the times of Hetmans Samoilovych and Mazepa.
From 1672 on, the Mezhyhirsky Monastery possessed the exclusive right to appoint priests to Sich parishes and oversaw the Samara, Lebedyn, and Levko Monasteries. The Mezhyhirsky Monastery sent grammarians to Sich schools run by the Church of the Veil. Mezhyhirsky monks also founded a school that taught church singing in the Sich. Although under the hetmans mentioned, the Roman Catholic Church had its own bishop in Kyiv, the spiritual and educational levers remained in the hands of the independent Orthodox church. The cloister played an outstanding role in Cossack life beginning with Hetman Sahaidachny, when it was run by Prioress Kommentariya. Yet, as Metropolitan Petro Mohyla noted, it did not have such sweeping powers then.
The third legend is connected with the treasures of this monastery, always one of the richest Orthodox cloisters. “The Mezhyhirsky Monastery,” Stryzhevsky said, “is extolled by society as a religious center of all Cossacks, as one that prays to God to protect the sinful Cossack soul. Every Zaporozhzhian considered it his duty to visit the monastery and bow to the Intermontane Savior. When doing so, almost each of them would give an icon, a censer or some other church item, as a keepsake, to the monastery. Silver and gold would flow in here from everywhere. Obviously, many hundreds of Turkish chervontsi (gold coins — Ed.), gained in the pitched battles for Christianity, found their way to the monastery’s treasury. Mezhyhirsky so appealed to the Cossacks that many of them donated all their property to the monastery and took monastic vows, spending here their last days. Kyiv still tells the story of a Cossack who abandoned lay life and entered the Mezhyhirsky Monastery.” More than one debate has been held on to the destiny of the Mezhyhirsky treasury and many donations the Cossacks and the nobility made to it. Although Russian sources often distort the truth about this matter, trying to hush up the robbery of monastic treasures by tsarist officials, it is beyond doubt that Ukrainian society kept the closely-guarded remnants of Mezhyhirsky treasures even after the cloister had been destroyed.
What was the destiny of Mezhyhirsky treasures? In 1788 some of the valuables were taken to St. Petersburg’s Aleksandr Nevsky Monastery. Another part was sent to the Kuban, only to be destroyed by Gen. Denikin’s officers during the Civil War. In the early nineteenth century, the Mezhyhirsky treasures were kept in Poltava’s Exaltation of the Holy Cross Monastery. They probably made quite an impression on the Poltava nobility of the day. Still, their remnants vanished without trace as early as in the mid-nineteenth century. It should be noted that Polish kings were also outstanding donors to and guardians of the Mezhyhirsky Monastery.
I once happened to leaf through 1698 archival files of the General Military Chancellery, which is a very small and incomplete collection of the Mezhyhirsky archives. They say that Radian Zhurakovsky came to the capital, Baturyn, in that year on behalf of Prior Feodosiy Vaskovsky, requesting he confirm the old privileges granted by Polish kings, as well as hetmans’ permissions of ownership. We learn from a General Military Chancellery record, “He, a father, and envoy submitted a very old copy written in the archaic characters” from King Zygmunt I to Prior Mykhailo Shcherbyna. In addition to this document, the hetman’s chancellery also received the record of Matiash, Kyiv voyevodstvo (regional government — Ed.) representative from Zbarazh Voronitsky, and the royal privileges of monastic ownership granted by Jan Kazimierz, Wladyslaw, Michal-Korybut Wisniowiecki, and Jan III Sobieski. Unfortunately, this collection does not contain the final decision of Hetman Mazepa, although he is known to have referred the matter to the tsars.
The monastery has the graves of Hetman Yevstafy (Ostap) Hohol, an ancestor of Mykola Hohol (Nikolai Gogol); Colonel Semen Paliy; and Appointed Hetman Samus who handed over the mace and the Polish king’s letter of permission to rule to Hetman Mazepa in 1704 at Nizhyn. The Synodic manuscript tells about the donors and guardians of the Mezhyhirsky Monastery. It is not only the great hetman but also his Kyiv relative Fedir Mazepa who donated to the cloister. Out of the Cossack guardians and donors, let us note Stefan Kysil, Vasyl Chuikevych and Iryna Somko “of the Zaporozhzhian Army,” Hetman Petro Doroshenko, and the “Cherkasy born and raised” Hetman Barabash. The monastery also received costly gifts from zemstvo (local self-government) officials, such as Kyiv voits (sheriffs) Yakiv Balyka and Ivan Khilchak. A special record is dedicated to Polish kings, also monastery donors and guardians, and the Ukrainian and Polish gentry. Let us recall a few of the best known nobles who made a name by offering gifts to the monastery: the Vinnytsia clerk Ioan Mikulynsky, Voronin, Maksym Trypilsky, Kostiantyn Yarmolynsky, Kyiv clerks Yelets and Mykola Stetsky; Hryhory Verbytsky, Yosyp Skoryna, Lazar Zablotsky, Roman Maksymovych, Ioan Nehrebetsky, Vasyl Dvoretsky, Mykhailo Kropyvnytsky, and Ivan Ilyinsky.
In the 1920s, a special commission was set up in Ukraine to try to find the Mezhyhirsky treasures. This commission was subordinated in 1930 to a Ukrainian SSR — Russian SSR Joint Commission headed by Kopik. An agreement was signed to return the Mezhyhirsky treasures, as well as other Cossack relics, should these be found. Indeed, a part of the treasures was spotted at the Hermitage and the Kremlin Armory. But the agreement was not fulfilled, the Ukrainian commissions were disbanded, while most of their members were executed as enemies of the people. The Mezhyhirsky Monastery is still closely guarding its secrets hidden from the outsider’s eye.
