Church of St. Elijah, Shepit

The real gem of Bukovinian wooden architecture, St. Elias Church, is located in the village of Shepit in the middle of the Bukovinian Carpathians. The church is unique in its combination of established traditions of church building in Bukovyna with the trends of the time.

The church was built in 1898 on the site of the old Assumption Church. The money was allocated by the village community. St. Elijah's Church has come down to us almost in its original form.

From the outside, the church has a characteristic onion dome. In general, the building is an attempt to combine traditional forms with the modernism that prevailed at the time. The unusual shape of the roof with raised skates also attracts attention.

St. Elias Church is an architectural monument of national importance. Nearby is a wooden two-tiered bell tower, the same age as the church. Inside the church there is an unusual item - the throne of the emperor, which was not taken to Vienna when the empire collapsed in 1918.

The one-story, monumental church has a complex stepped silhouette and curvilinear forms that are unconventional for the Bukovyna school of folk architecture, which were used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Art Nouveau style. Its architectural design combines the traditional architecture of a single-domed church with the features of the Art Nouveau style. The church consists of a nave that is considerably elongated in the transverse direction, as well as a narthex and altar located to the east and west of it, which are elongated in the longitudinal direction (with a sacristy and a sexton's room on the north and south sides).

The dominant feature of the church is a massive dome over the center of the elongated nave in the form of a flattened onion. The steep roofs over the narthex and the altar end in ridge-pulled upward, giving the building additional curvilinear forms. The walls of the altar and nave are divided into two tiers by a canopy on curly brackets, and the Babinets is surrounded by an open arched gallery above the chancel. The church is further decorated with small lancet windows with colored panes.

In the middle of the church there is an imperial throne, a unique work of art that was not taken to Vienna in time for the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 and left in Shepot.

The ensemble of St. Elias Church also includes a two-tiered frame bell tower with an onion-shaped top that repeats the shape of the church's dome, and a wooden fence with an entrance gate covered with a shingle roof.

The church was built in 1898 in honor of the 50th anniversary of the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph I on the site of the old Assumption Church, built in 1763.

Shepit is one of the most remote villages in the Chernivtsi region. The district center Putyla is 32 kilometers away by mountain road. There are bus services from Chernivtsi, but we warn you about the poor quality of the roads. If you decide to travel by your own car, you need to continue from Putyla on the T-2601 highway. The church itself is located in the northern part of the village.

Please note that the village is home to one of the largest waterfalls in Bukovyna, the Suchavsky Hook.