St. Nicholas Church, Eastern Orthodox church in Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, Ukraine

St. Nicholas Church is a refectory church of Cossack Baroque style built around 1700 in Kyiv Pechersk Lavra. Its three-part plan joins a refectory, a faceted altar and a vestibule; the walls carry pilasters and the windows have profiled frames. The blue pear-shaped dome, studded with gold stars, rises 16.5 m and is topped by a cross with a gilded dove.

A wooden church may have stood here since the time of Nicholas Sviatosha, a Chernigov prince who took vows at the monastery and founded a hospital for monks; the first written mention is a 1462 note in the Kievo-Pechersk Patericon. The stone church was built around 1700 as the central building of the St. Nicholas hospital monastery, with a hospital wing added after the 1718 fire and a bell tower in 1768. A second storey with the hospital church "Utoli moya pechali" was added in 1861, the church burned in World War II, and Yevgenia Plamenytska restored it in 18th-century forms in 1956–1958.

The church is named after Saint Nicholas of Myra, patron saint of its founder, Nicholas Svyatosha, a Chernigov prince who took monastic vows at the Lavra. It was the central building of the Lavra's Saint Nicholas hospital monastery, and Nicholas Svyatosha founded a hospital for sick monks. Today the building serves as the lecture hall of the National Kyiv-Pechersk Historical and Cultural Reserve.

You can enter the church through the main gates of the monastic complex during visiting hours. Respectful behavior and modest clothing are expected, particularly when services are taking place.

The church's 1780 iconostasis by Kyiv carver Andrii Zdorylkovskyi has not survived; its silver royal doors were made in 1802 by jeweller Samson Strelbytskyi. A bronze plaque with a relief portrait of Agapit of Pechersk, a physician monk, was placed on the south facade on 14 September 1982, sculpted by O. Moldavan-Fomenko.