The Church of Saint Stephen is a wooden temple built in 1795 in the village of Usychi by the Serna River, not far from Torchyn. It is an active parish church and a monument of Volyn folk architecture. The village is small and quiet, and the church here is the main decoration and the ancient heart of the community.
Architecture
The church is built of wood on a stone foundation. It is three-domed and single-nave: three log structures of equal height, rectangular in plan, stretched out in a single line. Above the nave is a closed log vault on a low octagonal drum with two windows, covered from above with a ceiling.
The most interesting part awaits inside. High arched openings unite the entire space of the temple, and their smooth lines echo the medallions of the paintings. The choir forms the second tier of the western log structure and is illuminated by highly cut windows. Because of this, the church is light and spacious, although it looks modest from the outside.
The village of Usychi
Once the village was called Usichi. At the end of the 19th century, there were 88 homesteads and over 550 residents, with a church and a mill in operation. The lands belonged to the state, and previously to Karol Czernecky, later to the Peretiatkovych, Tyshevsky, and Yavorsky families. In 1928, 883 people already lived in the village.
The surroundings of Usychi are a veritable archaeological reserve. A Bronze Age settlement with dugouts and burials was found by the Serna, and a few kilometers away lies a Kievan Rus hillfort from the 11th–13th centuries and a burial ground that still had 80 mounds at the end of the 19th century.
Video about the Torchyn community
Nearby
Torchyn is a few minutes' drive away, and Lutsk is about half an hour away. More can be found in the article Lutsk Raion.
How to find
Usychi lies near Torchyn, south of the Lutsk — Volodymyr highway. The church stands in the center of the village.
