Number DOI: http://doi.org/10.33209/2519-4348-2707-9627-2022-10-121

VB. – № 10, 2022. – P. 193-206

Summary

One of the characteristic phenomena of the development of church life in Volyn in the interwar period was the Neo-Union movement, against which the clergy of the Orthodox Church fought. At the same time, until recently, there were no in-depth studies of this issue in Ukrainian historiography. Nor has anyone pointed out the role of illegal weddings in the Uniate propaganda process in Volyn. This article deals with the analysis of the influence of Uniate priests performing such weddings on gaining the support of the Orthodox population and the development of the neo-union in the Volyn Voivodeship. We are talking about weddings, which the Orthodox clergy did not have the right to perform for certain categories of people – in which the previous marriage remained unbroken, for close relatives and conscripts who did not receive permission from the commissars district military. In the early years after the appearance of the Neo-Union in Volyn, converted priests, commonly referred to as “flights”, used these marriages extensively as a means of agitating the people in favor of the Neo-Union. The “flights”of Yevsevia Slozko and Oleksiy Pelypenko, who built their campaign in some villages of Volyn mainly on such demonstrative attention to people’s needs, which no one else supposedly could solve, benefited the most. The Orthodox clergy protested against such actions by the Uniates, feeling discriminated against, but the authorities did not react to the violation of the laws, which encouraged the neo-Unionist priests to continue their practice. However, at the end of the 1920s, the attitude of the civil authorities towards the celebration of illegal marriages by the Uniates changed. Three “flyovers ” were sentenced to prison, after which the Uniates stopped such marriages. Time has shown that while the blessing of illegal marriages in general has contributed to the spread among people of information about Uniate priests, nevertheless, those who requested such a marriage, for the most part, had no intention of betray orthodoxy and molest the Neo-Union.

Key words: Neo-Union, Yevseviy Slozko, Oleksiy Pelypenko, marriage.

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