Two wooden churches carried this film and neither one is where you would look for it. One burned to the ground in 2006 and a brick church was put up on the spot. The other still stands in a small town north of Chernihiv. The footage shot inside it was thrown out in Moscow, and the interior was then copied plank for plank on a soundstage.
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places on the route
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Filming ran from July to the autumn of 1966, and the two churches are 570 km apart.
The film opens here. The Kyiv seminary that turns its students loose for the summer is the ground of the Yelets Monastery on Preobrazhenska Street, and the windowsill Khoma Brut sits on belongs to it. The Dormition Cathedral is in the shot behind the crowd. The cathedral is twelfth century and the monastery around it was begun in the 1060s, wrecked in 1239 and rebuilt twice, in 1623 and again in the 1680s.
When the crew arrived in July 1966 it was not a working monastery. It had been closed in 1921 and religious life did not come back until the early 1990s. It is a convent now, with the cathedral, a gate belltower, monastic cells, the Peter and Paul refectory church and a brick wall around the whole lot. It sits on a rise above the street, and there is a signpost at the bottom of the hill pointing up.
In 2012 Mosfilm sent Chernihiv a set of working stills and footage of scenes that never reached the finished picture. The Chernihiv Ancient reserve, which holds this monastery as a monument, took them into its collection.
Seven hundred and fifty metres east, on a spur cut off from the old citadel by a ravine, five gilded domes over whitewashed brick. The same send-off sequence at the head of the film was shot around the outside of this church.
It was consecrated in 1715 and paid for by two Cossack brothers, Yakiv and Semen Lyzohub, carrying out the will of their father Yukhym, colonel of Chernihiv. It commemorates their grandfather and the Chernihiv regiment at the storming of the Turkish fortress of Azov in 1696. The plan copies a traditional Ukrainian wooden church in brick: five octagons, each with its own dome, the middle one raised above the rest. There is no principal facade. Three entrance portals face north, east and south, and the building reads the same from any side you approach it.
The Lyzohub seat was at Sedniv, twenty-five kilometres north-east, and the other church in this film stands there.
Sedniv stands on the high right bank of the Snov. The church is set apart from the houses on a rise called Koronnyi Zamok, inside the earth ring of the old hillfort of Snovsk. It is wooden, in three parts, with an octagonal tower over the middle and no nails anywhere in it. A survey team measured the building in 1955 and found the tower walls lean inward, so the towers narrow by ten to twenty centimetres towards the top.
Nobody agrees when it went up. One reading gives 1715, another says no later than 1747, and Stefan Taranushenko, who catalogued the wooden architecture of Left-Bank Ukraine, put it in the seventeenth century. The state protection plaque screwed to the planking outside declines to choose. It says between 1715 and 1747, monument number 1789.
This is the church of the three nights. Khoma reads over the dead girl here and the coffin lifts and circles under the tower. What happened next is the odd part. The material shot inside was rejected in Moscow, and the interior was reproduced at Mosfilm so the scene could be done again on a stage. The dome the coffin flies under on screen is a copy. The one it was copied from is above your head when you walk in.
Walking in is not guaranteed to stay possible. The parish priest has posted video of rain coming through the roof, and a restoration started earlier was never finished. Up to fifty thousand people a year come to Sedniv, and most of them come for this building.
It has taken film units before and since. Ivan Kavaleridze shot Grigory Skovoroda in the town in 1959. The Battalions Ask for Fire came in the mid-eighties. Marysia Nikitiuk filmed When the Trees Fall in Sedniv in 2018, fifty-nine years after Kavaleridze. The Lyzohub house in the estate park below is the oldest masonry dwelling in Left-Bank Ukraine.
Wind back to the first reel, before the dead girl and the three nights in the church. The students are let out for the summer and go tearing off home, and on the way they blow through a village market and come out the far side of it with a stolen goose. That market is Brusyliv.
The name comes from paper: the shooting log Mosfilm kept while the picture was being made, which Oleksandr Lytovchenko, a researcher at the Chernihiv Ancient reserve, found in the studio archive. Two Chernihiv outlets have since written the log up, three years apart, and the later of them, CHEline in November 2024, quoting the local historian Andriy Kurdanov, is the one that puts the goose in this village. Two articles are not two proofs. Both are reading the same pages, and neither of them prints one.
There is a second Brusyliv in Ukraine, a town in Zhytomyr Oblast, and neither article says which of them it means. This one lies eleven kilometres south of Sedniv, inside the stretch of country the unit was already working in. The distance is the argument for it, and neither text offers a better one.
CHEline says pages of the log have been copied onto boards and stood up in front of St George's church at Sedniv.
Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast
Horokholyn Lis
Horokholyn Lis in September 2025, looking across the fields towards the Carpathian foothills.
A village of seven hundred people in the Carpathian foothills, under Mount Horokholynska, with the river Horokholyna running past. Six hundred kilometres from Sedniv, far enough that the two ends of this shoot are not one journey.
The wooden Church of the Dormition here is the farmstead church of the story, and the graveyard beside it was filmed too. The building was not old. It went up in 1943, which made it twenty-three years old when the camera arrived in the autumn of 1966.
It burned to the ground in 2006. A brick church with gilded domes was finished on the site in 2008, and that is what is standing when you get there.
