• 25 Jan 2011

         The efforts undertaken to find the archival documents, related to the history of the St. Aleksey church in the Pohrebea village, start to bring results. Some contacts with the Tiraspol-Dubasari eparchy managed to be established. An outstanding person, Alferyeva Liudmila Pavlovna, is working there as a referent for a long time, being a strong devotee of her tasks. For many years she works in different archives, where little by little gathers materials on the history of Orthodoxy in Transnistria.

           Learning about our search, Liudmila Pavlovna has shared her thoughts about the church. The Pohrebea village, placed on the left bank of the Dniester River, administratively was never a part of the Bessarabian province of Russia. Till 1918 it was part of the Tiraspol uyezd (district) of Kherson province. That is why the archival search should be carried out in St. Petersburg, Kherson, Odessa, Nikolayev and Tiraspol. In the Chisinau archives one may find only the documents related to the after war period. Systematizing the collected data, Liudmila Pavlovna has compiled a list of priests of the Mikhail church of the Pohrebea village from 1876 to 1918. This list is as follows:

    Tiraspol uyezd

    Dubasari okrug (district)

    Priest Ioann Shevazutskii (1876).

    Priest Grigorii Ferlat (1876).

    Priest Georgii Zaltur (1884).

    Priest Efrem Slovinskii (1885).

    Priest Stefan Sandulevskii (from June 1885-1886).

    Priest Maxim Kulpinskii (1891-1892, 1896).

    Priest Vukol Lastovetskii (from October 1898).

    Priest Georgii Verdish (1900-1901).

    Priest Iakov Ioannovich Parabin (from February 1905-1907, 1909-1910, 1912-1913, 1915-1918).

    Psalmist Iakov Nagachevskii (1876).

    Psalmist Fedor Portareskul (1885).

    Psalmist Manuil Surmeli (1886, 1888).

    Psalmist Ioann Parabin (1891-1892).

    Psalmist Fedor Filippovich (1898-1900).

    Psalmist Georgii Baksan (1912-1913, 1915 – October 1916).

    Acting psalmist Fedor Kryjanovskii (1876, 1884 – March 1885).

    Acting psalmist Miron Lozinskii (1896).

    Acting psalmist Fedor Solonari (July 1896 – August-October 1898).

    Acting psalmist Karp Gerlak (1900-1901, 1905-1907, 1909-1910).

    Acting psalmist Leonid Chegoryan (from June 1918).

    It is worth mentioning that the first Mikhail church, with a cane roof, was built in the Pogreby village in 1771 and stand till 1797, when became worthless and in line with the church authorities’ decision was demolished. A stone Mikhail church was erected in 1819, using the parishioners’ means and, supposedly, existed till 1921. At the same time, the first mentioning of the St. Aleksey church date from 1912. We would also like to attract attention to the fact that during the period 1905-1918 Iakov Ioannovich Parabin was the priest of the Pohrebea church. The St. Aleksey church was constructed exactly during the years of his work. We suggest that he played a significant role in this church history and in the future would like to find more documents about this personality.

     

     

    We would also like to present here the data from the directory of the Kherson eparchy dated 1906 concerning the Mikhail church of the Pohrebea village:

     

    -       Congregation – Moldovans;

    -       Number of peasant homesteads in the parish – 214;

    -       Number of male parishioners – 566;

    -       Number of female parishioners – 557;

    -       Number of boys studying in the parochial school – 62, number of girls – 8;

    -       Staff – priest and psalmist;

    -       Priest is provided with a church house;

    -       A stipendiary (remuneration) is allocated, rhuga (payments from parishioners and land):

    to priest – 300 Rubbles; to psalmist – 100 Rubbles.

    -       Church land – 29 and a quarter of dessiatins (dessiatina: measure of land = 10.900 sq. metres or 2.7 acres);

    -       Plot of farming land – 1975 sq. sazhenii (sazhen: measure of length = 2.134 metres). There is an orchard on the farming land.

    -       Priest – Iakov Ioannovich Parabin, 35 years old, graduated from the Odessa religious school, head of the parochial school, has wife and children of 11, 9, 3, 13, 7, 5, 1 years old.

    -       Acting psalmist – Gerlak Karp Fedorovich, 32 years old, from the public school, has wife and a child of 2 years old.

    We would like to thank Liudmila Pavlovna Alferyeva for her assistance and the provided documents.