Kremenets, Ternopil Province, Ukraine, November 6, 2026
Photo: inok.info
Ukraine’s Supreme Court has shut the door on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s last hope of keeping the Holy Theophany Convent in Kremenets, rejecting the Ternopil Diocese convent’s cassation appeal and ending a legal fight that dragged on for nearly three years.
The court upheld earlier rulings requiring the convent’s complex of buildings to be handed over to the state, according to raskolam.net.
The decision is final and can’t be appealed. The convent now has to vacate the premises, which are considered state property.
The proceedings included more than 40 court sessions. Representatives of the Church argued that nuns live permanently in the cells and that they’d be left without housing. Igor Derevinsky, Deputy Director of the Kremenets-Pochaev State Historical and Architectural Preserve, countered that the complex is a nonresidential architectural monument of national significance, and that the agreement signed in the 1990s expressly bans using the premises as permanent living quarters.
Because of the Soviet era repurposing of the monastery buildings, they were plundered and left in a severly damaged condition. All the church vestments and utensils, as well as the monastery library had been stolen. When the monastery was returned to the church in 1990, Abbess Cherubima and the sisters undertook extensive structural and general repairs to the premises, replaced the stolen vestments and untensils, revived and restocked the plundered library, and beautified the grounds.
So, the state museum chose this time, after all of these repairs and purchaces have already been completed through the sisters' efforts and financial means, to take the property under its control and boot out the sisters who made the property worth something.
The case materials justify this repeat plunder by stating that the convent’s free-use agreement for the buildings expired back in September 2023. The court found the convent’s arguments unfounded and described them as an attempt to drag out the return of state property.
The complex includes the Holy Theophany Cathedral, a cell building dating to 1760, and a 20th-century bell tower.
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The Holy Theophany Monastery in Kremenets was founded as a male monastery in the first half of the 17th century. In 1725, it was taken over by Uniate Greek Catholics and did not return to Orthodoxy until 1839. In 1953, the monastery was transformed into a convent, and by 1959, there were 67 sisters living there. On July 29-30, 1959, the monastery was closed and the church was used as a gym, while the monastic residential building housed a hospital.
The rebirth of the monastery began on August 26, 1990, when the Sorrowing Icon of the Mother of God, kept in the monastery before the revolution and moved to the Pochaev Lavra after its closing, was carried in procession back to its former place. Nuns returned to the monastery in 1991.
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