Spiritual objects have been housed for hundreds of years at the site of the Holy Trinity Cathedral today. Nearby was the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Cross – according to some reports, the first Catholic church in the city. The history of the Bernardine Monastery, which now houses the city’s main Orthodox shrine, dates back to 1643. At that time, the noble lady Agnieshka Stanishewska conveyed the land near the Church of the Holy Cross to the Bernardine Order. They founded a monastery here. Agnieshka handed over hospital and a neighboring building to Bernardines.
In 1648, during the Liberation War under the leadership of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, a church and a monastery were destroyed. The monastery was looted and set on fire, furniture and the altar were torn down, bells, icons and jewels stolen. Bernardines returned to the city but suffered another fire in 1696. The saddest part was that the church was set on fire by an organist there to hide the theft. After so many setbacks, however, the construction of a stone monastery began.
Later, the church was rebuilt. Construction was completed in 1789. In 1853, Bernardines were forced to leave the city. The temple remained a parish shrine of Lutsk Catholics until 1864, when it was handed over to the Orthodox, which in the city was only about 5%. The cathedral was rebuilt under the guidance of 13 architects and designers and was consecrated in 1880. Since that year it become the main Orthodox shrine of Lutsk.
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Adress: Hradnyi Uzviz st., 1
Phone number: +38 0332 723 448
We invite you to visit the main tourist site of Lutsk – a medieval castle of the XIV century. It won first place in the category “castles” of the All-Ukrainian competition “Seven Wonders of Ukraine: castles, palaces, fortresses”.
Mision of the museum is to create museum institution of the highest level that changes past, reflects present and creates future to develop the nation spirituality and promote Ukrainian art in the world. Here you can see the largest painting in the world – “Cosmogony”, covering an area of over 2000 square meters.
The Chortoryiski princes Tower is the only one of the 8 towers of the Lutsk Lower (Okolnyi) Castle that has survived to this day. The Museum space «Okolnyi Castle» is a modern historical part of the defensive structure of Lutsk from the 14th – 17th centuries. The Upper Lutsk Castle was rebuilt from wooden fortifications to stone ones between the late 14th and 15th centuries. The first line of defensive of the Upper Castle, the Okolnyi Castle, began its transformation in the early 16th century, when wooden towers were gradually replaced with stone structures.
In addition to the above-ground city, Lutsk has an extensive network of underground tunnels. The two levels of the underground city housed sacred objects, a refectory, a prison, and tombs. There are many legends about the unique two-level underground complex, the entrance to which is located beneath the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul. Their height is particularly impressive, reaching almost 8 meters in some places.
Lutheran church (now Baptist) in Lutsk an architectural monument, located on Karaimska Street, 1 in the State Historical and Cultural Reserve “Old Lutsk”.
The Museum Space «Okolnyi Castle» is a new tourist attraction created on the basis of restored architectural monuments of national importance: the Chortoryiski princes tower with part of the defensive wall and the Jesuit Monastery with its dungeons.
