Description of the attraction
The Church of the Assumption of the Virgin in Slavkovichi was built in 1810 and was erected by numerous parishioners. The church has a side-altar, consecrated in the name of St. John the Baptist, and a year later, a side-altar was built in the name of the Life-Giving Holy Trinity. The chapel of John the Baptist during 1890-1893 was expanded with the money of the parishioners and was consecrated again on November 7, 1893.
The church, as well as the adjoining bell tower, were built of stone. The bell tower building stands separately from the temple building. The bell tower was badly damaged in 1834 by a fire, but was soon repaired through the efforts of the parishioners. The bell tower had eight bells. The very first cast bell reached a weight of 101 pounds and had an inscription, like the third bell; the rest had no inscriptions.
The parish had twelve chapels. At the Assumption Church there was a Vladimir chapel built of stone, which was erected in 1865 at the expense of parishioners, and the rest of the chapels were built of wood. At a distance of half a verst from the temple stood the Pyatnitskaya chapel, equipped with a well.
In the Church of the Assumption of the Most Holy Theotokos there were three thrones: the first or main one was consecrated in the name of the Assumption of the Mother of God, the left - in honor of the Most Holy Theotokos, the right side-altar - in honor of the Cathedral of the Holy Prophet Forerunner and John the Baptist. There was an ancient abandoned cemetery not far from the church building.
The main volume of the church is a cube-shaped quadrangle with one dome with a light drum made of wood with a small dome and a cross. The temple roof is made of four-pitched iron. On the east side, the temple is adjoined by a lowered pentahedral apse, and on the north side - a lowered one-domed side-chapel equipped with a decorative octahedral drum. On the west side, there are lowered vestibules of the side-altar and the quadrangle.
The decorative design of the facades is very modest: a rather simplified cornice runs along the upper part of the walls. On the northern, southern and western facades of the quadrangle in the central upper part there are semicircular window openings. In the side faces of the apse part of the quadrangle there are window openings with bridges made in the form of arches, and the central part has a decoration in the form of a niche equipped with the same arched lintel. There is a semicircular pediment with a parapet on the facade of the vestibule from the west, and a semicircular niche is attached above the wooden doors, which has a metal peak, which is supported by metal brackets. The main entrance to the temple is decorated with semi-pillars, which carry an arch with an archivolt, and in its center there is a keystone. The façade facing the north has four window openings with arched lintels, as well as two fairly late buttresses on the eastern side of the wall. The overlap of the quadrangle was carried out with the help of a closed vault. In the vestibule and side-chapel, the vaults are made of trunks with formwork over the windows. The temple is built of limestone slabs, then plastered and whitewashed.
The almshouse of the parish guardianship and the hospital at the church parish did not exist. The parish school began its work in the spring of March 3, 1884 in a building separately built for educational needs. During 1910, 45 students studied at the school.
It is known that in 1917, Pechansky Grigory Platonovich served as the archpriest of the Church of the Assumption, and Lebedev Ioann Vasilievich and Orlov Dmitry were priests. After some time, Vasiliev Emelyan Mikhailovich, a native of the village of Stanki near the Ostrovsky district, became the deacon of the church. In 1935 he was arrested and exiled with his family to one of the villages of the Perm region. Already in 1936, Emelyan Mikhailovich died. During 1942, the iconostasis was re-painted at the icon-painting workshop at the Pskov Orthodox Mission in the Church of the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos. During the Great Patriotic War, Nikolai Vasilievich Uspensky was the church priest.
Currently, the church is active.
