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Paper short abstract:

I will focus on Ukrainian Greek Catholic minority in Poland, mainly on communities in the East and North-West of the country. By exhibiting the interactive nexus of religion, memories, connection to places and shrines, I will show their belonging to Ukraine, and engaged empathy to the ongoing war.

Paper long abstract:

From 2015 to 2018 I conducted fieldwork in the multiconfessional rural communities of the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands and Ukrainian communities in North-West of Poland. I did follow-up research there in 2022. Those communities were forged from Greek Catholic and Orthodox Ukrainians, forcibly resettled from Subcarpathia in the frames of Operation “Vistula” (1947) to the North-West of post-war Poland. Since early 1960-s some Greek Catholics and later, their descendants started to return to their ancestral lands in Subcarpathia, reviving shrines, pilgrimage routs and churches that were ruined.

In communist Poland, the Greek Catholic Church was officially prohibited, and a number of priests were persecuted. Greek Catholics were forced to convert to Orthodox Christianity or Roman Catholicism. Despite the prohibition, a number of priests and nuns continued to carry out their pastoral work underground, organizing secret meetings at home, providing lessons of Ukrainian language and basics of catechesis. This quiet resistance against communist state-imposed Polish homogeneity and silence of the communist era, together with the memories about resettlement, religious rituals and liturgy in their native language, forged and cemented Ukrainian Greek Catholic minority in Poland.

For this community religion has served as a bridge, connecting the past with the trauma of resettlement and the future for the descendants who re-root with ancestral lands, “coming back” there, reviving pilgrimage sites and settling in. Religion has also been a means of resistance against officials and giving Ukrainians in communist Poland a hope that their religious and ethnic community will survive. This community holds strong connections with Ukraine, calling it "spiritual motherland" and "Great Ukraine". The community members showed a great empathy since the start of Russian invasion in 2014, being engaged in volunteer help. However, since the full-scale war (24.02.2022), they are fully engaged in Ukrainian matters, showing active empathy and belonging to Ukraine.