Holy Ascension Church (Kiev)

The church was erected in 1882-1883 for the needs of the residents of the village of Demeevka near what was then Kiev. A significant part of the funds for the construction of the church was donated by Mr. Rauser, director of the Kiev Sugar Refinery at Demeevka. The solemn consecration took place on February 18, 1883. Erofei Iosifovich Shmigelsky was probably the first priest of the new church, and Simeon Travkin, retired sergeant major, became the church elder. In 1889, Nikanor Leontyevich Dankevich became a priest.

On July 25 ( August 7 ), 1907, Lesya Ukrainka married Clement Kvitka in the Ascension Church.

Panorama of Demeevka in the 1880s. On the left you can see the Ascension Church

Around the years 1905-1910, a parish school was erected at the church, the building of which has survived to this day. As of 1915, in addition to the school, the church already owned a library, which numbered about 1,200 copies, a priest's house (1907) and a clergy house (1914), and a small cemetery. In 1917, the church owned 1 tithe of 600 square fathoms of land, the parish numbered more than 4,000 people.

In July 1920, when Soviet power was already established in Kiev, the parish community at the Ascension Church was registered. In 1922, the church was partially transferred to the UAOC and to some extent reconstructed. Since 1922, the priest was Dmitry Khodzitsky (1886-1962), in the future he was repressed. In 1933, the Ukrainian parish dissolved the government, before that, in the 1920s, the bell tower of the church was dismantled (a new one was erected in the 1990s). However, the temple thereafter continued to be operational and never closed. During the Nazi occupation, in March 1942, the rector was Archpriest Nikolai Sarancha.

The Ascension Church in terms of baptized, single-domed, with a faceted apse and small outbuildings between the arms of the cross. At first the church was wooden. In 1885-1892 it was lined with brick and expanded, 2 vestibules from the west and from the south were erected. The main volume was blocked by a squat tent, which ended with a dome on a faceted drum ; from the west, the tent belfry adjoined this volume, another poppy crowned the altar part.

In 1900, according to the project of architect Evgeny Ermakov , a significant reconstruction of the temple took place. The western Babinets, over the narthex of which a new tent bell tower was built, was completed. The main tent is raised on a granular drum, choirs are arranged, the church is decorated in a pseudo-Russian style: the drum is decorated with kokoshniks , the windows are decorated with platbands. In 1910, the eastern part of the church was expanded according to the project of E. Ermakov; in January 1911 a new chapel was consecrated in honor of St. Basil the Great . It was then that the church acquired a modern look, but the original iconostasis and the interior of the church were not preserved.

• Kiev: Encyclopedic Reference / Ed. A.V. Kudritsky . - Kiev: Main Edition of the Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia (URE), 1982. - P. 98. - 90,000 copies.
• Bilokin S., Kalnitsky M., Kurgaєva A. Voznesenska Church // The Sound of History and Culture of Ukraine. Encyclopedic vision. In 28 volumes. Kiev: Book. 1, part 1: AL / Redcol. to that: Відп. ed. P. Tronko and іn .; Order: V. Gorbik, M. Kiporenko, L. Fedorova. - K .: Goals. ed. The memory of history and culture at the sight of the “Ukrainian encyclopedia” im. M.P. Bazhan, 1999 .-- 608 s: il. - ISBN 966-95478-1-4 .

• Page on the site of the UOC (MP)