Description of the attraction
The Cathedral of St. Nicholas the Good stood on Podol in pre-Mongol times, but more mentions of it are found already in the 16th century. It was then that, at the expense of the legendary Cossack Samil Koshka, the temple of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker was restored instead of the old one that had previously burnt down.
There are no exact statements about why the temple has such a name - St. Nicholas the Good. Perhaps this is due to the fact that an almshouse for the poor and sick worked at the temple, and perhaps because a lot of funds were spent on one of her predecessors by the merchant Dobrik, who received a ransom from a captive Polovtsian.
In August 1651, during the invasion of the troops of Janusz Radziwill, the temple burned down. Only in 1682 it was restored in the form of a five-bath wooden church, which after a couple of decades also burned down, but already from a lightning strike. So that nothing like this ever happened to the temple, in 1716 it was rebuilt in stone. A bell tower was built nearby, which has survived to this day. However, by the end of the 18th century, the church fell into decay, especially due to the fire, which provoked the appearance of cracks in the walls, which were constantly increasing. In 1800, the future chief architect of Kiev, Andrey Melensky, dismantled the temple that had fallen into disrepair and began to erect a new one in its place, choosing for the construction the then fashionable style of classicism. The construction took seven years, and after that the temple became one of the most beautiful and popular in Podil. It was here, after the restoration carried out at the beginning of the twentieth century, that the famous writer Mikhail Bulgakov got married, and his mother was buried there later.
In the 30s of the twentieth century, the temple was closed, and its priest was repressed. In 1935, the church of St. Nicholas the Good was completely destroyed, and a school was built in its place. The only thing that remains of the temple complex is a bell tower, unusual for these parts.
