In March 1918, a parish priest named Mikhail Pukhalsky was tortured for three hours in the yard beside his own church, and killed - and his wife Maria killed with him. Their church was one of the oldest in Kryvyi Rih, the Church of the Nativity of the Theotokos, a modest place a group of farmers had opened as a prayer house in 1886. What that congregation endured across the century that followed - the murder, the seizures, the long enforced silence - is a story of a community that would not let its faith be taken from it, no matter how many times it was told to stop.
The church was born of the countryside and its rhythms. A local rural society opened it in 1886 and dedicated it to the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, whose feast on the 8th of September fell, in the folk calendar, just as the last of the fieldwork was finished and the harvest gathered in. It was a fitting patronage for a farming community. The parish grew to serve some 2,700 souls across 250 houses in Kryvyi Rih and two neighboring villages, tended by a single priest and a cantor. One early parson, Father Vladimir Babura, became a noted preacher and writer whose sermons were published as far away as Moscow and St. Petersburg. By 1897 a small school had opened at the church, where fifty children learned their letters, their arithmetic, and their prayers.
Then came the revolution, and with it the killing of Father Pukhalsky and his wife. In 1922 the Bolsheviks stripped the church of its valuables. Through the 1920s came proposals to turn it into a village club or an antireligious institute; the building was finally closed in 1935 and refitted as a holding facility for the children of the repressed. Still the parish would not die. Services carried on in a private house until 1938, when the entire clergy was swept up by the NKVD. Only under the German occupation could worship briefly revive, and after the Second World War the congregation - grown to some 4,000 - bought a house and made it a prayer hall, until Khrushchev's campaign against religion shut it once more in 1961. Time and again the doors were closed. Time and again the people found another room.
The turning came on the 7th of February 1991, when the buildings began to be returned to the community that had kept faith with them for a century. What followed was a slow, deliberate resurrection. A central dome went up in 1995. A bell tower rose between 1997 and 2000. A spiritual center, a gated churchyard, a wholly renewed interior - the ensemble took shape year by year, until the church became one of the recognized landmarks of the city, an image local painters return to for inspiration. Today around 150 children fill its Sunday school, and its choirs have carried the parish's music to festivals abroad. The building that farmers raised, that a revolution tried to erase, now stands complete at last - proof of how much a congregation can outlast if it simply refuses to disband.
The Church of the Nativity of the Theotokos stands at 47.914N, 33.339E, in the city of Kryvyi Rih, central Ukraine, amid the long industrial sprawl along the iron-ore ridge. From lower altitudes look for its central dome and bell tower rising above the surrounding streets. The nearest airport is Kryvyi Rih International (UKDR). Note that Ukrainian airspace is closed to civil aviation during the war.