The Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker in Yuratishki this year celebrates its 500th anniversary. This temple is the same age as one of the main Belarusian shrines of the Zhirovichi Assumption Monastery.
The foundation of the church is associated with the name of Albrecht Martinovich Hastold, Chancellor of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Vilnius Voivode.
In the XV - XVI centuries, the Gastolds, along with the Radziwills, were considered the richest and most influential family in the GD. Albrecht, being one of the most educated people of his time, was the author of the first Statute of the Grand Duchy of 1529, had a library and archive significant at that time, the artifacts of which are stored today in Moscow, Vilnius, Warsaw, Munich.
The wife of Albrecht Sofia, daughter of Prince Vasily Vereisky, the great-granddaughter of the Holy Blessed Prince Dmitry Donskoy and his wife Saint Euphrosyne of Moscow, played an equally important role in the founding of the St. Nicholas Church in Yuratishki.
Sophia's mother came from the Paleologists, the last dynasty of the Byzantine emperors. It is no coincidence that Sofia sealed the letters with a seal depicting the coat of arms of Byzantium - a two-headed eagle.
It is known that on July 29, 1518, on the day of Christmas of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, being the Polotsk governor, Albrecht defeated the Moscow forces, and in 1519 received the second most important position in the Grand Duchy of Troy - governor. Therefore, it was no coincidence that in 1519 he erected a stone church of St. Nicholas in his ancestral residence - in Geraneni, and after that - St. Nicholas Church in Yuratishki.
Why did Catholic Hastold build an Orthodox church? There is nothing surprising. Religious tolerance in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania distinguished this state from the European countries of that time and inherited the Belarusians.
The wooden church at that time was quite large, because in addition to the main throne in honor of St. Nicholas, it also had a side church in the name of St. Paraskeva Friday.
The governor gave the church more than 90 hectares of land, 5 yards in Yuratishki, hayfields for 100 carts of hay, the right to collect duties on fairs in the days of St. Nicholas (May 9 and December 6 according to the old style) and St. Paraskeva (tenth Friday after Easter).
Sofia Vereiskaya made generous donations to the church.
The Gastolt dynasty died out with the death of the son of Gastolt Stanislav in 1542. From 1543 to 1717, Yuratishki was in the possession of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, who were also church worshipers.
On their behalf, the place and church were governed by governors. Among them, for example, Prince Vasily Telatyevsky, a descendant of the governor of Tsar Ivan the Terrible, who escaped to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, was a descendant of Rurik in the 18th tribe. In 1717, the Sejm of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth transferred the place to the private possession of the great clerk of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Mikhail Kopty, to which the rights of a church clerk passed. From his grandson Tadeusz Kostyalkovsky, an ambassador to the famous Four-year Diet, who adopted the Constitution on May 3, 1791, who managed to accumulate debts of an astronomical amount of more than two million zlotys, Yuratishki went on account of the debt to the family of Rodkevichs, who became the last church worshipers.
Although the worshipers, in the first place, were obliged to defend the rights of the church, but in practice it was they who often violated them.
These sometimes detective stories are preserved in documents that are still kept in the Lithuanian State Historical Archive.
For many generations, this church is, first of all, an icon of the Mother of God, which became famous for its miracles in the 18th century and saved the church in the years of later hard times.
As the old documents say, "by local parishioners and the surrounding all residents, this image is considered miraculous" and people are "attached to it as to their mother." Decorated with silver crowns, the faces of the Mother of God and the baby Jesus Christ to this day look at everyone who comes with faith, hope and love to the Nikolaev Church.
History has preserved the name of the first priest in Yuratishki Ephraim Martinovich, who served in the church in the XVI century for more than 40 years. In general, the temple was lucky with priests. Most of them served in it for a long time, leaving behind a good memory.
Already mentioned Joseph Falevich, the confessor of the deanery, priesthood 57 years; his successor, Jacob Savitsky, who was awarded the Order of St. Anne of the III degree, was a priest for 36 years. Returning from the fronts of the First World War, Father Vyacheslav Buryatinsky, who was buried at the altar of the church, gave service to Yuratishki for 25 years. Two rectors who served in the church after World War II, Archpriests Vladimir Nasekaylo and Vasily Timokhin were awarded the right to wear one of the highest awards of the Russian Orthodox Church - the Miter.
What does the local legend say?
Local legend has it that there used to be 10 churches in Yuratishki.
Is this so, only archaeological excavations can say. Nevertheless, in the parish there really was more than one church: along with the Nikolaev Church in Yuratishki, the church of John the Theologian was located in the cemetery, the Varvarinsky (then Andreevskaya) church was in Tokarishki, the Boris-Gleb (then Cross Exaltation) church in Zykovichi, Tenyukovshchina - the Church of St. John the Baptist, in Kryliszki - the Transfiguration Church, in Dovgerdishki - the Alexander Nevsky Chapel, and then the Mikhailovsky Church.
Inexorable time erased not only the traces of these temples, but also the memory of them. Only the parish church, guarded by its heavenly patron, Nicholas the Miracle Worker, has been rising for five centuries in the very place where it was built by the governor Albrecht Gastold, "so that praise be not God in it," and the church archive, which was painstakingly created by the rectors of the church and is carefully preserved today kept by Archpriest Sergiy Kozachk, saves for us the names of our ancestors, who were his parishioners.