Trinity Church

Nice view from the road, in perfect combination with the history of the city.

Everyone takes this photo.

Beautiful and authentic architecture ❤️🇺🇦

The Church of the Holy Trinity is considered by some researchers to be the oldest of the churches in Kamianets, one that existed during the time of the Koriatovychs. In the surviving documentary sources, the first mention of the church dates back to 1582. In the XVI-XVII centuries. the church was a cathedral, and the governors (officials) of the Lviv Orthodox bishop lived next to it. The church had a school and a hospital. During Turkish rule, the church was turned into a mosque. In the 1740s, it was rebuilt by the Basilians as the main church of the Greek Catholic monastery of the Holy Trinity, and after the annexation of Podillya to Russia, the church became Orthodox. By type, the original church belonged to the defensive temples, the altar (eastern) part of which in plan had the shape of a shamrock (the so-called triconch type), and the western part had a bell tower above the porch. Adjacent to the square nave in plan was a semicircular apse from the east, semi-circular exedra (conch) from the north and south, and a bell tower from the west. The thickness of the walls of the temple is about 1.8 m, the walls of the exedra are a little thinner - about 1.2 m. Initially, a battle tier was erected in the Trinity Church above the nave, exedra and apse. It was probably a stone parapet pierced by a line of loopholes. Thus, the nave initially consisted of two tiers, the lower, actually the temple, which was about 8 m high, and the upper, defensive about 2 m high. A bell tower was added to the nave from the west, which was also used as a defensive tower. In the late XVIII - early XIX centuries. over the nave was built a bulky false wooden bath, which distorted the original appearance and proportions of the temple. In 1854, an octagonal stone bath, topped with a dome, was built on the site of a wooden bath. In 1858, during another reconstruction, two single-storey outbuildings appeared near the temple, erected between the apse and the exedra. Interestingly, in 1835 a project for the reconstruction of the monastery was developed. The project, in particular, provided for the demolition of the old three-conch temple and the construction of a new church in its place in the Russian-Byzantine style with five baths. The only thing that saved the ancient church was the lack of funds for the project. 100 years later, however, the Bolsheviks could not escape the temple. In 1932, a resolution was passed to close the Trinity and St. John the Baptist Churches in Kamianets-Podilskyi, as well as the Kazan Cathedral. Three years later, in 1935, the Church of the Holy Trinity, a valuable architectural monument of the XVI century, was dismantled to its foundations. In the early 1990s, the land on which the church stood was handed over to the monks of the Greek Catholic Order of St. Basil the Great, who decided to begin rebuilding the church on cleared foundations. Construction began in 1995 after two years of archeological excavations and a thorough survey of the remains of the ancient church. The construction lasted 15 years, the newly built church was solemnly consecrated on July 10, 2010. The author of the project of the new church was the architect Volodymyr Bevz. Although the construction work was positioned as a restoration, in reality the project did not provide for the restoration of the temple in the features it had for centuries. The project envisaged rather the construction of a new building, created "based on the image" of the ancient church. For example, the church bell tower, which towered over the church in the 17th century, was not restored. and was destroyed in 1672, then rebuilt in the middle of the XVIII century., Then stood until the destruction of the temple in 1935. At the same time, was restored wooden bath over the nave, which appeared in the temple only at the beginning of the XIX century. As a result, the restored church does not look like a Podolsk defensive church of the XVI-XVII centuries, or a church of the second half of the XVIII-XIX centuries. The project of fencing the temple had nothing to do with the restoration at all. Nevertheless, the newly built Church of the Holy Trinity became the decoration of the square and the entire Old Town and surprisingly fit well into the city skyline above the eastern edge of the Smotrych Canyon. Due to its convenient location on the hill, the church is perceived as one of the high-rise dominants of the northern part of the city and is its new architectural accent.

Wonderful church. Repair works were carried out on the territory. Could not go in the middle.