If you are a brick or stone church you are unlikely to see the world beyond your native glade. Wooden temples are another matter. Among them, especially those built in Western Ukraine there are many travelers. There are churches that have had to travel not once but several times, as it was quite common practice in the past. For example, a village or town wanted to built a new church, and the old one was sold to another, poorer community. Then it could be resold again, if there was such an opportunity.
The technology was being practiced for centuries. A wooden temple was carefully dissembled; all the beams and boards were carefully marked. Then it was carefully collected in the right order in a new place.
After the First World Was perturbations, which left scars of trenches and fires on Ukrainian land, this practice almost disappeared. Actually, it is almost, as poor villages didn’t buy churches anymore, but the rich cities did, for the museums.
The fashion for open-air museums of folk architecture has spread worldwide since the beginning of the 20th century. They were called ‘skansens’ after the name of the first such institution opened in Stockholm in 1891. But the wooden temples, which were threatened with destruction, were transported not only to museums, but also to city parks. For example, In the Kinsky Park in the canter of the Czech capital, Prague, there is a beautiful Lemko church from the Medvedivtsi village near Mukachevo. This is how the wooden Boiko Church of the Wisdom of God in the open-air museum ‘Shevchenko hai’ collects likes under its photos on social networks. It is just one of those travelers that had to change their place of residence in the interwar period. And it made almost 170 kilometers: from Kryvka in Turka region to the Galician metropolis.
Kryvka is a Boiko province, a neighbor of Matkiv, which is on the UNESCO World heritage list. That’s why they are so similar. But the Kryvka one is covered with charming, cozy silver spruce shingles. What a beauty! Three log houses, surrounded by a wide attic with emporium gallery above the narthex, are completed with three multi-tiered steep tops, almost tower, like a roe of three slender Carpathian spruces. Or maybe there are three Japanese pagodas nearby? In front of a carved wooden gate with a high shingled roof, there is an ancient carved wooden roadside crucifix.
It was built either in 1763 or 1795, and was dedicated to St. Nicholas. And it served the peasants faithfully until 1927, when the villagers decided to build a new, larger church. It is still there, glistening with a cheap damask top.
And the older church was saved by Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytskyi together with Mykhailo Drahan, Ilarion Sventsytskyi , the head of the National Museum in Lviv of hat time, and Archimandrite Klymentii Sheptytskyi. The dissembled shrine was moved to the Kaiserwald district (there wasn’t a skansen in Lviv at that time), where in 1930 it was re-assembled by Tsyniv masters Toma Dzuryn and Prokip Demkiv. A year later a wooden fence with a gate and a wicket grew around the temple. At the new ‘registration’ the church was consecrated on July 7, 1931 under the name of the Wisdom of God, and was given to the Greek-catholic monks-students use. Their St. John’s Lavra (monastery) was established shortly before that, in 1927.
Only timbers were taken to Lviv, the old iconostasis was inherited by the new church in Kryvka. A baroque iconostasis (late17th-early 18th century from Volia-Zhovtanetska near Kamianka-Strumylova (now Kamianka-Buzka) was erected in Kaiserwald. When in 1966 the open-air museum was created in Lviv, is started with the Kryvkivka church, the first exhibit of the museum.
The church is an exhibit, but it is also a functioning church, it happens like this. Since 1990 the church has been cared for by monks from St. John’s Study Lavra. Yes, you’ve got it right; the church is also the main building in Lavra, whose territory is all the Shevchenko hai. The monks live nearby, in the premises of the former monastery laundry.
In winter groups of carolers gather near it, in the warm season brides are photographed here, children are taught to shoot a bow nearby. It’s a living church in a lively place. You can enter it from Wednesday to Sunday within museum working hours. There are services at 7 and 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. every day except Thursday and Sunday, on Thursdays – at 8 and 9.30 a.m. and 6 p.m., on Sundays – at 8.20 and 9 a.m. and 6 p.m.
In 2020 the shingles on the three tops of the Boiko beauty were repaired. The money was being raised for five years through art auctions and sponsorships.