From the history of the church of “Saint Hierarch Nicholas” in Costiceni, former Hotin county

This article reconstructs the history of the church dedicated to “St. Hierarch Nicholas” in the locality of Costiceni, former Hotin County (now in the Cernăuți region, Ukraine), the native village of the Bessarabian poet Ion Vatamanu. The study begins with the earliest documentary attestations of the holy place of worship, dating from 1770, and continues to the present day. Based on parish registers, diocesan bulletins, archival documents, and oral testimonies of local residents, it presents the succession of priests who served in Costiceni beginning at the end of the 16th century, the process by which the church was endowed with land between 1840 and 1923, as well as the construction, between 1858 and 1879, of the present stone church in place of the wooden one, which had been affected by the passage of time and the floods of the Prut River. A separate chapter is devoted to the policy of Russification of the Bessarabian clergy after 1871, the 1911 visit of the Russian bishop Serafim Ciceagov, and the circumstances that led to the controversial removal of the parish priest. The consequences of the two world wars for the community, the effects of the Union of Bessarabia with Romania in 1918, and the purchase of new church bells from Bucharest in 1924 are also analyzed. The final part of the study describes the situation of the Costiceni parish in the postwar years, in the context of Sovietization, collectivization, and religious persecution. Through the information brought together, the article places the history of the religious community of Costiceni within the context of the transformations that took place in northern Bessarabia over the last two and a half centuries.