Qualla: Trinity Cathedral, Samar

Trinity Cathedral, Samar: Introduction

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Skoropadsky, CC BY-SA 4.0. Nine wooden domes climb into the sky over Samar, arranged with such geometric confidence that architects have called the structure without parallel anywhere in the world. This is the Trinity Cathedral, and it holds a distinction no other church in Ukraine can claim: it is the only surviving nine-domed church built entirely of wood. The Zaporozhian Cossacks raised it between 1772 and 1781 in what was then the heart of the Samara Palanka, a district of their self-governing realm. To stand beneath its central dome, sixty-five meters overhead, is to look up through the confidence of a people who built their grandest monument not in stone but in timber, and made it soar.

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Image: Skoropadsky | CC BY-SA 4.0

Trinity Cathedral, Samar: Built Without Nails

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Олегггниколаевич, CC BY-SA 4.0. The man credited with the cathedral is Yakym Pohribnyak, a self-taught folk architect, and the building is his masterwork. Its plan is a symmetrical composition of nine domes: the tallest at the center, four lower ones facing the cardinal directions, and four lower still filling ...

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Image: Олегггниколаевич | CC BY-SA 4.0

Trinity Cathedral, Samar: Rebuilt in Its Own Image

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit СЕРП75ДНІПРО, CC BY-SA 4.0. A wooden building this large is a wager against time, weather, and fire. The cathedral was first renovated in 1830, then rebuilt between 1887 and 1888, restored in the old style but with some alterations, and the bell tower that now accompanies it went up after that reconstructio...

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Image: СЕРП75ДНІПРО | CC BY-SA 4.0

Trinity Cathedral, Samar: The Cathedral in a Novel

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit СЕРП75ДНІПРО, CC BY-SA 4.0. Under Soviet rule the church was put to a humiliating use, turned into a storehouse, its sacred space filled with goods. That indignity became literature when the Ukrainian writer Oles Honchar made a threatened cathedral the center of his novel The Cathedral, a book that captured...

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Image: СЕРП75ДНІПРО | CC BY-SA 4.0

Trinity Cathedral, Samar: Racing the Rot

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit СЕРП75ДНІПРО, CC BY-SA 4.0. By 2012 the cost of survival had come due. The monument had gone more than 130 years without a proper restoration, and the wood was failing. Restoration work began that August, and the building was worked on again in 2021, a slow campaign to save timber that had stood since the a...

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Image: СЕРП75ДНІПРО | CC BY-SA 4.0