Attractions of Nizhyn

The Museum of Rare Books named after Hryhoriy Vasylkivskyi has been operating in Nizhyn since 1985 on the basis of the fundamental library of Mykola Hohol Nizhyn State University.

It is located on the second floor of the university library in the ancient building of the Merchants' Assembly in the center of the city of Nizhyn. The museum bears the name of one of its founders, Professor Hryhoriy Vasylkivskyi.

The library is based on 2,500 volumes of the personal book collection of Count Oleksandr Kushelyev-Bezborodko, who was a trustee of the Nizhyn Gymnasium of Higher Sciences, the predecessor of the current university.

The exposition presents many unique European and Slavic editions of the 16th - early 20th centuries, including rare copies of editions of the works of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (Venice, 1513), Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" (1544), "Aeneid" Virgil (1567), classic editions of the works of European thinkers of the 16th-18th centuries.

The special pride of the museum is the Holy Gospel of 1689 from the Nizhyn Annunciation Monastery, a gift of Metropolitan Stefan Yavorsky. The huge tome weighs almost 18 kilograms, some pages are painted by hand, the titles are gilded.

The Greek Church of Saint Michael the Archangel is the scariest church of the Greek community preserved in Nizhyn.

Built in 1719-1729 in the Greek quarter of Nizhyn. Since then, it has never been rebuilt, thanks to which it has preserved the archaic forms of Balkan architecture.

Currently, Saint Michael's Church is closed, services are not held. The temple does not catch the eye, as it is hidden behind the larger church of All Saints.

Saint Nicholas Cathedral is the main temple of Nizhyn, one of the first examples of Ukrainian Baroque architecture.

The cathedral was built in 1658-1668 by Cossacks of the Nizhyn regiment at the expense of colonels Ivan and Vasyl Zolotarenk on the site of an old wooden temple. It repeats the classic techniques of Ukrainian wooden architecture in stone. A characteristic feature of the architecture of the five-domed temple is "comprehensiveness", that is, it looks the same from all sides. Inside, the carved iconostasis deserves attention.

In 1663, the Saint Nicholas Cathedral in Nizhyn became the center of dramatic events associated with the "Black Council" - Ivan Bryukhovetskyi, the basket chieftain of the Zaporizhzhia Sich, was elected hetman of the Left Bank of Ukraine here, which is considered the beginning of the Ruin - the collapse of the hetman state.

According to local legend, in the same temple (still wooden) Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytskyi married Hanna Zolotarenko, the sister of Nizhyn colonels, but in fact their wedding took place in Korsun.

In 1990, the Saint Nicholas Cathedral was restored and handed over to the religious community of the UOC of the Moscow Patriarchate. The Warm Church of John the Baptist (1842), which was part of the complex, was rebuilt into the House of Culture (Batyuka Streetб 16).

Monuments to Bohdan Khmelnytskyi and Mariya Zankovetska have been installed in the park.

The Church of the Transfiguration in the Baroque style was built on the territory of the Nizhyn suburb of Nove Misto.

The architecture uses a rare method of combining a cross volume with a three-story finish, which is traditional for the wooden temple architecture of the western regions.

In 1857, a bell tower was completed, which has not survived to this day.

In 1861, a funeral procession stopped in the church during the transportation of the body of Taras Shevchenko to Ukraine.

During the Second World War, the Germans tried unsuccessfully to blow up the temple during their retreat.

The Trinity Church is located in the Greek quarter of Nizhyn. The single-domed stone church in the Baroque style was built in 1733.

In 1888, it was thoroughly rebuilt, as a result of which it acquired features of classicism. In particular, the shape of the dome was completely changed, a two-tier bell tower with a spire was added on the western side. The church yard was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence at the end of the 19th century. There is an original inscription on the fence with the date of the last reconstruction and the name of its initiator.

For a long time, the Trinity Church was closed, the premises of the church were used as an archive. Currently, the Nizhyn City Council has started the process of returning the Trinity Church to the city community and has adopted a corresponding decision.

The Yuriy Lysyansky Memorial House-Museum is a department of the Ivan Spassky Nizhyn Museum of Local Lore.

The first Ukrainian traveler around the world, Yuriy Lysyansky, was a navigator, geographer, oceanographer, cartographer and ethnographer, a descendant of the Nizhyn noble Cossack-priestly family. He took part in the first circumnavigation in the history of the Russian Empire, which took place under the command of Ivan Kruzenstern. An island in Hawaii, a peninsula in Alaska, a strait, a river and a mountain in Sakhalyn are named after him.

The Lysyansky Museum is located in the house of the priest of the Church of Saint John the Theologian, in whose family the future sailor was born in 1773. The first exhibition hall with a temporary exhibition "Traveler of the Cossack family" opened in 2021. Here are some household items of the Lysyansky family - utensils, a clay Cossack pipe, etc.

Also in the exhibition you can see items related to the life of naval officers and training in the cadet corps, weapons of the time, a model of the sloop "Neva", on which Lysyansky traveled around the world.