The Church of St Onuphrius is very rare in several “respects”.
First, its dedication. In Ukraine there are few churches of St Onuphrius the Great (a great ascetic and devotee of the Church of the 4th century), and almost all of them are in the west of the country. Ancient tradition connects the founding of churches of St Onuphrius with cemeteries (because the holy hermit for some time laboured in Akeldama, on the “potter’s field” bought for thirty pieces of silver of Judas for the burial of strangers). So the skete founded by Zakhariia Kornylovych, abbot of St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, at the beginning of the 18th century also served as a resting place for the brethren of this famous Kyiv monastery.
By the beginning of the 21st century, what remained of the skete was the name of the village and the church itself, built in 1705. Hence the second distinction of the church: its age. Of all the preserved wooden churches of the Kyiv region, only three are older: in the villages of Dorohynka (1528, now in the Kyiv skansen), Ostriiky (1606) and Pyshchyky (1651) (the last two are now in the Pereiaslav open-air museum).
The third striking feature of the Church of St Onuphrius is its originality. It seems to lead in the height of its walls among the preserved churches of the Dnipro school. Because of this feature, the church was not much damaged during the rebuilding at the end of the 19th century. It then acquired side chapels and an additional, lower tier of windows. The upper parts, however, remained undamaged (except for the lost crowning of the babynets, rebuilt in the 21st century).
The interior is dominated by the 18th century. The towering vaults seem to contain the heavens, under which wonderful creations of the Baroque era quietly shine: royal doors, paintings on a cabinet of uncertain purpose, folk icons… And even the garish modern paintings do not bring dissonance into the calm and joyful soul of a pilgrim…
