Samara Saint Nicholas’s Monastery

Samara Saint Nicholas’s Monastery (Самарський пустинно-миколаївський монастир; Samarskyi pustynno-mykolaivskyi monastyr). An Orthodox men’s monastery on the Samara River near the settlement of Samarchuk (Novoselytsia, now part of Novomoskovsk, Dnipropetrovsk oblast). It was founded in 1602 as a small fortified monastery with a wooden church and a home for convalescing Cossacks on the territory of the Samara palanka of the Zaporozhian Host. The original buildings were destroyed in the mid-17th century and then rebuilt in 1672. The Zaporozhian Host granted the monastery 18,500 ha of arable land, five mills, pasturelands, and forests to provide the Zaporozhian Sich with food. It continued to serve as a retreat for sick and elderly Cossacks. After the destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich in 1775, it was assigned to the Mezhyhiria Transfiguration Monastery. In 1787 it became independent once again, and in 1791 it came under the control of the eparchial bishop. Before the First World War it housed eight monks and a boys’ school. The main church at the monastery, built in 1782, contained a valuable icon of the Mother of God and many church artifacts from the Zaporozhian era. The monastery was closed by the Soviet authorities in the 1920s.

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