The Centre hosted a research seminar by Dr. Julia Buyskykh, a socio-cultural anthropologist affiliated with the Institute of History of Ukraine, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and an NGO, the Centre for Applied Anthropology in Kyiv.
From 2015 to 2018 Dr Buyskykh conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the multiconfessional rural communities of the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands and also Ukrainian communities in North-West of Poland. Those communities were forged from Greek Catholics and Orthodox of various backgrounds and were forcibly resettled from their homeland in Subcarpathia.
Since the late 1950s – early 1960s some Greek Catholics, and later their descendants, started to come back to their ancestral lands in Subcarpathia trying to settle in old family places or closer to them. In communist Poland, the Greek Catholic Church was officially prohibited and Greek Catholic clergy and believers 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.
This quiet resistance against communist state-imposed Polish homogeneity and silence of the communist era, together with the memories about resettlement, religious rites, rituals and liturgy in their native language transmitted through family’s upbringing and sense of belonging, forged Ukrainian Greek Catholic minority in Poland with rather distinctive religious and ethnic identity.
In her talk, Dr Buyskykh drew upon qualitative data from Przemyl and the surrounding rural area, also from Biay Bór and Cyganek to illustrate how local Ukrainian Greek Catholics were able to resist, to survive through communism, and to develop their communities through religion.