Rykhly Saint Nicholas’s Monastery

Rykhly Saint Nicholas’s Monastery (Пустинно-Рихлівський Миколаївський монастир; Pustynno-Rykhlivskyi Mykolaivskyi monastyr). A men’s monastery located in Rykhly, near Korop, in the Chernihiv region. It was established in 1666 on the site of a 1620 apparition of an icon of Saint Nicholas. Its first benefactors were Hetman Demian Mnohohrishny and his brother, Vasyl Mnohohrishny. The initial wooden structures were replaced by stone ones in the 18th century. From then the monastery had four churches: the three-nave Church of Saint Nicholas (built in 1749–60); the Church of Saint John the Baptist, funded by Hetman Ivan Samoilovych; the Church of the Nativity of Christ, built in 1749 and restored in 1847; and a small church located on the site of the reputed appearance of the icon. The monastery also had a hospice. At the turn of the 20th century the monastery was headed by a hegumen, and housed 52 monks and 100 novices. In the 1920s it was closed by the Soviet authorities, and all of its buildings were razed.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]