Seminarium naukowe 14.06.2022: Routes to the Roots: Ukrainian Greek Catholic Shrines and Pilgrimages in Eastern Poland

Zapraszamy na ostatnie w tym roku akademickim seminarium naukowe 14 czerwca o 09:30 w sali im. Józefa Burszty. Dołączyć do spotkania w MS Teams można przez ten link.

Julia Buyskykh 

Routes to the Roots: Ukrainian Greek Catholic Shrines and Pilgrimages in Eastern Poland

Taking as a background an extensive fieldwork in Eastern Poland (Subcarpathia) in 2015-2018 my talk will cover the relationships between memories of the post-World War II resettlements, religious practices, and the feeling of belonging to places and shrines. Two Greek Catholic sites considered in this study, Kalwaria Pacławska and Góra Zjavlinnia are being revived both mentally and physically through the memories and restored religious practices around them. In the perspective of those Greek Catholic and Orthodox believers expelled from the region after World War II and for their descendants, those places remain holy, despite being ruined and desecrated. I will argue that pilgrimages serve as means to claim continuity with a particular place and with the group that shares a history of belonging to that place. Using an anthropological lens, my research shows the important role that pilgrimages play in linking people with their ancestry and specific sacred places – churches, pilgrimage sites, springs – in which family memories become part of religious experience, and religion is perceived as it is lived.

Julia Buyskykh is a historian and cultural anthropologist affiliated with the Institute of History of Ukraine (Ukrainian Academy of Sciences), and an NGO The Centre for Applied Anthropology. She received her PhD In Ethnology in Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University, and did her post-doc at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, the University of Warsaw (2015-2016). In October-December 2017 she was a research fellow at Prisma-Ukraina Research Network Eastern Europe in Berlin. She spent the academic year of 2019-2020 at Pennsylvania State University as a Fulbright scholar. Her research interests include lived religion (Eastern Christianity) in post-socialist Europe, inter-confessional relationships, memory and border studies, Polish-Ukrainian shared history, empathy and ethics of qualitative research.