Basilian Monastery of St. Nicholas in Krekhiv, Greek Catholic monastery in Krekhiv, Ukraine

The Basilian Monastery of St. Nicholas is enclosed by a thick four-sided wall with octagonal towers at the corners, forming an irregular pentagon. The main church, built of white stone in 1721–1737, has a helmet-shaped dome on an octagonal drum and a portal with a relief of St. Nicholas. A long two-storey white building with a grey hipped roof and a round stone tower stands within the walls.

Monks from the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, Yoil and Sylvester, settled in a cave near Krekhiv in the 1590s. With support from Stanisław Żółkiewski they built the first churches, and the monastery was founded in 1612. In 1672 Ivan Mazepa defended it during a siege, and in 1698 Peter I visited while negotiating with Augustus II. It became Greek Catholic in 1721 and was closed by the Soviets in 1949, reopening in 1990.

The monastery keeps four miraculous icons: three of the Virgin Mary, one brought from Verkhrata in 1808, and one of St. Nicholas. The Verkhrata icon was returned from Lviv's St. Paraskeva Pyatnytsia church on 19 May 1991. Monks from the Buchach monastery moved here in 1751.

The monastery lies roughly 40 kilometers northwest of Lviv and welcomes visitors interested in Ukrainian religious history. Walking through the compound allows you to see all the buildings and understand the layout of the complex properly.

The monastery's library held 396 books by the 19th century, the oldest a chronicle from 1493. A quarter mile north stood a stone pillar with a cross, said to mark where a Tatar khan's son was killed by a cannon shot from the north tower.