Annunciation of the Lord Parish (Cherkasy)

The first reliable mention of Cherkasy dates to 1305. In 1386, the town became the capital of the Ruthenian Hetmanate. It received Magdeburg rights in 1791, although some accounts suggest that it had enjoyed this privilege earlier. In 1797, it became the centre of a county in Kyiv Governorate. During the Soviet period, Cherkasy became a district centre and later a regional centre, a status it retains today. The city currently has more than 276,000 residents.

By 1765, Cherkasy had a chapel dependent on the Parish of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Smila. The chapel apparently fell into disrepair, since records describe the construction of a new St Nicholas’s Chapel in 1780, this time under the Parish of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Moshny. This chapel survived until 1924, when the Soviet authorities destroyed it without a trace.

From 1995 to 1998, the spiritual needs of Cherkasy’s Roman Catholics were served by Fr Stanislav Muravskyi, who travelled from Talne. When a separate parish was officially established in Cherkasy on 27 April 1997, he became its first pastor.

In 1998, a single-storey house at 22 Pionerska Street was purchased for the parish and converted into a temporary chapel. It still serves as the parish church: several services are held because it cannot accommodate all the Catholics of Cherkasy at once.

In February 2010, through the mediation of a Polish delegation, an agreement was reached with the city authorities to build a church, since Cherkasy remained the only regional capital in Ukraine without a Roman Catholic church building. The necessary permission and a plot for a new neo-Gothic church were obtained on 10 May 2012.