Dr Julia Buyskykh (UCC)
Pilgrimages in a Landscape of Memories: The Сase of Ukrainian Greek Catholics in Poland
Thursday 29th February
3 pm
ORB 1.24
The revival of local Christian pilgrimages to sacred sites such as springs, wells, footprint stones, abandoned chapels, and devastated shrines is widely known and increasingly practised throughout the post-communist European terrain. In some cases, in fact, these pilgrimages have been uniting scattered individuals and groups in this terrain into a community. Most importantly, I argue, for Ukrainian Greek Catholics in Poland, the revival of these ruined places of worship has become a means of communal, religious, ethnic, and even national rebirth, whereby a formerly clandestine minority is emerging as a distinctive and vocal community.
Since 2015 I have been conducting ethnographic field research on various Ukrainian Greek and Roman Catholic pilgrimages in Polish Subcarpathia. In 2016 and 2017 I was engaged in a cross-border pilgrimage from L’viv in Ukraine to Kalwaria Pacławska in Poland. In 2018 I took part in another Greek Catholic pilgrimage, this time in Poland, from Przemyśl to the mountain of Zjavlinnia (Apparition) near Fredropol. Both pilgrimage sites, being venerated as Marian Apparition places, were stages of a well-known interwar Greek Catholic pilgrimage route. However, Second World War and post-war border shifts (1944 – 1951), combined with forcible resettlements that followed (1944 – 1947, 1951), changed the “religious scape” of the region completely, resulting in Subcarpathia becoming an almost homogenously Polish Roman Catholic area where Greek Catholic religious buildings in the region were either repurposed or destroyed outright.
Notwithstanding this desolation, since the late 1980s, Ukrainian Greek Catholics began returning to these ancestral Subcarpathian places and shrines, migrating internally and reviving abandoned pilgrimage routes, shrines, and churches. Raising money, support, and other resources among Ukrainians with roots in Poland, yet residing in Canada, Australia, the USA, and elsewhere, the community built a new church on the mountain of Zjavlinnia and brought the pilgrimage there back to life.
Following Tim Ingold’s idea of ‘landscape as a story’ (2003) that encompasses memories, I examine the relationships between memories of the post-WWII resettlements among returnees, and their religious practices and sense of belonging to these places and shrines. Two Greek Catholic sites considered in my talk are being revived both narratively and physically through the memories and restored religious practices, where meanings are being remade on the move. From the perspective of those Greek Catholic believers expelled from the region after WWII and their descendants, those places remain holy, despite being desecrated and lying in ruins. Pilgrimages here serve as a means to claim continuity with a particular place and with the group that shares a story, which is becoming their own recovered history, of belonging to that place.
Julia Buyskykh is a historian and anthropologist, co-founder of an NGO the Centre for Applied Anthropology in Kyiv, Ukraine. She received her Ph.D. in History from Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University, had a post-doc at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw (2015 – 2016), and several research stays in Polish academic institutions (2014-2015, 2022). She spent the academic year of 2019-2020 at Pennsylvania State University as a Fulbright visiting scholar. She was a Sanctuary Fellow at the University College Cork, Ireland (September 2022 – February 2023). Her research interests include lived religion (Christianity) in Ukraine and Poland, inter-confessional relationships and ecumenical practices, pilgrimages, memories and borderlands studies, ethics and empathy in qualitative research. Currently, she is writing her second Ph.D. thesis in Anthropology and Study of Religions at the University College Cork, Ireland.