Short historical overview of the village of Oblitky
The village of Oblitky is first mentioned in the official records of the Kyiv Voivodeship for the year 1569. Like several neighboring settlements, it belonged to the Lavra estates within the Teteriv Volost.
The village’s name dates back to that very period and is associated with wild-honey beekeeping (in ukrainian lang. - (bortnytstvo), which was very widespread in this area: “oblit” refers to the first mass emergence of bees from their hives to gather honey.
Historical sources contain numerous court records concerning Oblitka. For example, in 1692, Oleksandr Rudnytskyi, the metropolitan’s estates steward, filed a complaint with the Ovruch City Council against the nobleman Y. Olekshych for the unauthorized seizure of land.
In 1614, the archimandrites of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra were involved in a legal dispute with the Tysha-Bykovskys, who owned estates in several villages in the Potievsky District but carried out raiding expeditions, violating the boundaries of Oblitok and other villages. However, just 44 years later, the Tysha-Bykovsky nobles fled to Poland, and their lands near Osichanka were seized by the Metropolitan of Kyiv :)
In 1705, Oblitky—still a village belonging to the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra at that time—is mentioned in connection with the events of Semen Paliy’s uprising (also known as the Paliy Uprising or the “Second Khmelnytsky Uprising”).
In the mid-18th century, with the establishment of a Uniate residence in Radomyshl, it came under the control of the Greek Catholic Church. Specifically, in 1780, Oblitky is mentioned among the metropolitan estates of the newly elected Metropolitan Jason Smogorzhevsky—the same man who began construction of St. Nicholas Cathedral in Radomyshl (a project whose work later remained suspended for a long time).
As of 1900, the village had a church parish, a blacksmith’s shop, a windmill, and a store. In 1905, a branch of the County Union of Rural Teachers was established in Oblitky. A credit union also operated there.
St. Nicholas Church
The church in Oblitky was built in 1900; at that time, it belonged to the Potiev parish.
The church is located on the banks of a tributary of the Shlyamarka River. Architecturally, the building belongs to the so-called “Synodal” style. There were many similar wooden churches, built according to standard designs of the Russian Synod, in what are now the central and northern regions of Ukraine—they served as a kind of imperial marker of the Russian Orthodox Church’s presence.
The building in Oblitky has features characteristic of this architectural style: it has a cruciform floor plan, is single-story, and was built of wood on a brick foundation. The structure possesses all the classic attributes of “diocesan architecture”—a hipped bell tower and an onion-shaped dome atop a tall drum.
In November 2023, the Zhytomyr-Polissya Diocese of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine announced the transfer of clergy from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church–Moscow Patriarchate and their respective parishes to the Zhytomyr-Polissya Diocese of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, including the local parish of the Oblitky church.
