Peremyshl church cupola dismantled amid protests (07/21/96)

Peremyshl church cupola dismantled amid protests

by Andrij Wynnyckyj
Toronto Press Bureau

TORONTO - The city of Peremyshl (Przemysl in Polish), located in Poland about 7 miles from the Ukrainian border, has been the site of a controversy that has aggravated inter-ethnic relations in the city, although the national governments of Ukraine and Poland have refused to be drawn into the conflict.

The dispute centers on the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, also known as the Church of St. Theresa, a 12th century edifice that over the years has served alternately as a shrine of the Polish Roman Catholic Carmelite Order and the cathedral of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic eparchy in the city.

The church was rebuilt in the 17th century in the baroque style, and in the 18th century the ruling Austrian authorities gave the shrine to the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, which enjoyed jurisdiction over it until the Church was suppressed by Joseph Stalin's regime in 1946.

In the 1880s, the architect Mykola Zakharevych, a professor of the Lviv Polytechnic, designed and built an addition to the shrine - a dome modeled on St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, incorporating elements of Ukrainian wooden church architecture. It was to symbolize the Ukrainian Catholic congregation's ties to the Vatican.

In 1991, statements by Pope John Paul II officially recognizing the revival of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Ukraine and Poland gave rise to hopes in Peremyshl that the erstwhile cathedral would be returned to the Ukrainian faithful.

However, in 1992, Cardinal Josef Glemp officially handed the shrine over to the Carmelite Order, which announced plans to change its appearance soon after, and took down the Greek-Catholic cross mounted on the dome.

Despite a constant barrage of entreaties to the order and to national and local Polish authorities from Ukrainian Polish associations, Lviv Mayor Vasyl Kuibida and Lviv Oblast Council Chairman Mykola Horyn, the Carmelite monks began acting on their intentions this year, with the express support of Polish officials in the Peremyshl area.

In a letter to the Peremyshl chapter of the Organization of Ukrainians in Poland (OUP) dated January 2, the Peremyshl conservator of historical monuments, Marek Gosztyla, declared that the Ukrainian dome was "not stylistically adapted" to the Peremyshl skyline and that "structurally and stylistically" it would be advisable for the shrine to "resume its original silhouette."

On January 26, the Peremyshl city council issued a declaration in support of the Carmelites' intention to "restore the original state" of the shrine. On February 19, Mr. Gosztyla gave an official go-ahead for the reconstruction.

On March 28, responding to Ukrainian petitions, the conservator general of historical monuments in Poland, Prof. Andrzej Tomaszewski, issued an order to the Carmelite monks not to proceed with the disassembling of the dome.

On April 23, according to reports in the Warsaw-based Ukrainian weekly Nashe Slovo, workers began peeling the metal covering of the dome on the church and disassembling the dome's wooden frame. By April 30, most of the structure was gone.

On April 24, Prof. Tomaszewski followed up his original directive with a statement that Mr. Gosztyla had not informed him of official clearance given to the project and warned of sanctions. The national conservation official also declared that building permits issued by the city to allow the disassembly of the dome violated Polish law.

On April 25, members of the Peremyshl City Council issued a letter addressed to a host of Polish and Ukrainian officials, declaring that the Carmelite Order had acted in full accordance with the laws of Poland as property owners, and stating that petitions from Ukraine on the matter were "an intrusion into the internal affairs of Poland, and a violation of relations between two sovereign nations."

The letter also denounced Prof. Tomaszewski's order as an "illegal subjection to the pressures exerted by nationalist circles on both sides of the border."

Also on April 25, the mayor of Peremyshl, Tadeusz Sawicki, issued a declaration stating that Ukrainian diplomatic circles and Lviv administration officials were attempting to impose the will of a Ukrainian minority in the city on the Polish majority.

On April 26, Miroslaw Czech, a Ukrainian deputy to the Polish Sejm, read out a declaration to a plenary session of the Parliament in support of the contention that the church was not merely private property, but a historical monument and an integral part of Peremyshl's architectural character, and thus subject to Prof. Tomaszewski's jurisdiction.

Mr. Czech called for a halt to the dome's disassembly and a redoubled focus on improved Polish-Ukrainian relations in anticipation of Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma's arrival in Poland.

On May 2, the Ukrainian World Congress sent a letter to Mr. Sawicki stating that the church is "a valuable architectural and historical monument of the city of Peremyshl that should be preserved in its present form for future generations." They called on the mayor to allow the dome to remain as "a symbol of Christian tolerance, reverence for historical patrimony and proof of the friendly coexistence of our two peoples."

On May 8, a special session of the Polish Parliament's Committee on National Minorities and Ethnic Groups was called, where, Nashe Slovo reported in its May 26 issue, the committee chairman, Jerzy Teliga, declared that the matter of the cupola should be addressed with the feelings of Ukrainians in Poland in mind. He said that "it is most unfortunate that we ourselves destroy symbols of our heritage. These are symbols of the Polish state."

Prof. Tomaszewski told the May 8 meeting that the Carmelite monks and the Peremyshl representative of his ministry had ignored a direct order to desist. He added that better plans and diagrams exist for the reconstruction of the dome than for a restoration of the shrine's 17th century baroque towers.

However, the deputy director of the Peremyshl district administration (wojewodstwo), Jerzy Marcinek, told the committee that work on disassembling the dome was 90 percent complete and declared that it had proceeded legally.

On May 14 in Warsaw, Polish Minister of Culture and Art Michal Jagiello hosted a press conference in the Warsaw offices of the Organization of Ukrainians in Poland with his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Ostapenko.

After the two officials met, Mr. Jagiello said he had expressed "words of sympathy" to the Ukrainian diplomat over the disassembling of the dome and pleaded that it not be misconstrued as an act of official policy. However, he declined to adopt any formal measures to reverse the dome's disassembly.

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