Foundation and early history The church of
the Nativity of the All-holy Theotokos in
Kryvyi Rih was opened in 1886 by a local rural society as a prayer house. It was named for the birth of
the Blessed Virgin Mary by Saints
Joachim and
Anne. Celebration of this feast day on 8 September (21 September
new style) coincided in the folk calendar with the finishing of the main fieldworks and
Harvest Thanksgiving. The street where the church was situated also was named after the Nativity of the Theotokos. The church belonged to the
Shyroke deanery in the
Kherson uyezd of the
Kherson Governorate of the
Russian Empire. A
parish of the church included 250 houses in
Kryvyi Rih and also 2 villages in the neighbouring
Yekaterinoslav Governorate – Shmakovo (Pokrovskoe) and Dubovaia Balka. It had nearly 2,700 people. The
clergy of the church consisted of a priest and a
cantor-reader. There were also a churchwarden and a parish guardianship (since 1893) that together helped to the clergy with economic business. One of the
parsons – priest Vladimir Babura – was a famous homilist and publicist in the country. His articles and collections of
sermons were published in
Odessa,
Kyiv,
Moscow and
St. Petersburg. Since 1897 there was a grammar school at the church that later received the status of a
parochial school. There pupils studied
Russian,
calligraphy,
arithmetic, religion, Slavonic reading and singing. In the beginning of the 20th century, there were 50 children studying at the school – 30 boys and 20 girls.
Soviet period With the beginning of the
Russian Revolution, parson
priest Mikhail Pukhalsky was killed together with his wife Maria after three hours of torture in his
parsonage at the churchyard in March 1918. In 1922,
Bolsheviks confiscated church items. During this period, the number of active parishioners was 540 persons in 1924. In 1929, the town executive committee received peasant's requests for turning the church into a rural club, and in 1930, the possibility of founding an antireligious university on its base was also considered. These plans failed, and the church was closed only in 1935. Later, it was refitted into a receiver-distributor for juvenile offenders and repressed parents’ children. But even after the closing of the church, the Nativity of the Theotokos parish did not finish its existence. Services were held in a private house on 18 Kirov Street until 1938 when all clergy was repressed by agencies of
the NKVD (the Peoples’ Commissariat for Internal Affairs in
the Union of Soviet Socialistic Republics). Only at the time of the
German occupation could the congregation renew its church life. In December 1941, the faithful people were given a building of a primary school on 45 Shyrokovska Street, and after the
Second World War they bought a house on 60
Lenin Street where they equipped a complete prayer house. In this period, the parish had 4,000 members and was headed by
archpriest Stefan Yanovsky, who was also the
Dean of the
Kryvyi Rih district of the
Dnipropetrovs’k diocese. At this time the prayer house performed the function of the cathedral. It was in existence until Khrushchev's
anti-religious campaign and was closed in 1961. == Present ==