UNIATE MOVEMENT IN KOSTOPIL COUNTY IN 1920s–1930s

Abstract

One of the little-studied phenomena of religious life in Volyn during interwar Poland was the Neo-Union. The purpose of this study is to analyze the development of the Uniate movement in the Kostopil County of the Volyn Voivodeship in the 1920s and 1930s. Its achievement involves delineating the circle of persons involved in this movement; disclosure of the features of its management and identification of persons who were engaged in direct missionary and pastoral work in the field; identifying the centers of the Union in the Kostopil County and finding out their future fate. The research methodology is based on the principles of historicism, objectivity and critical analysis of the source material. The use general scientific (analysis and synthesis, comparison, generalization, statistical) and special-historical (problematic-horological, historical reconstruction, historical-typological, historical-genetic, biographical) methods gave a chance to investigate the archival sources. During the research, it was found that the Uniate movement in the interwar period developed in Kostopil County in two directions. The first was connected with the colonization of this region by natives of Galicia who professed the Greek-Catholic faith. Just because of the considerable number of Galician colonists that a Redemptorist mission was opened in Kostopol in 1926, which moved to Kovel a year later. Until a certain time, the Galician colonies in the Kostopil region continued to serve the Redemptorists who came here from time to time, but in 1931 a separate Greek-Catholic parish was opened by the Lutsk Catholic bishop in the village of Antonivka, which has since become the spiritual center of the union in the county. Several villages of this parish had their own chapels, which made it possible to provide access to regular services for the majority of Greek Catholics in the Kostopil County. The second direction was the involvement of the local Orthodox population in the Neo-Union, but after a series of failures in this direction in the second half of the 1920s, such efforts ceased and were no longer recorded in the 1930s. The practical significance of the research results is due to the deepening of available information about the development of the Uniate movement in Volyn, as well as the possibility of the obtained results using in the process of further research on the history of religious movements in Volyn and in local studies.