Books by RISU contributors to be presented at Publishers’ Forum

A book titled “Basilian monasteries in Ukraine. Galicia and Transcarpathian region” will be presented at the Publishers’ Forum in Lviv on September 12, 2015.Its authors Volodymyr Moroz, Ihor Sklenar and Victor Zaslavsky are RISU contributors, and some original essays on the monasteries have been first published on our website.

The presentation is to begin on the specified day at 11.30. The venue is Potocki Palace, stand №241. The book was published by Ternopil Publishing House “Tutorials & Guides,” which readily agreed to support this project.

“Basilian monasteries in Ukraine. Galicia and Transcarpathian region”is a full color edition of 192 pages with many modern and old photos. The co-authors spent almost four years to write the book –that is how long lasted their journey to the sights, the process of informationfinding, writing the texts and compositionofalready written ones.

“The idea to create this very book emerged naturally during one of our conversations in the UCU building on Sventsitsky street in Lviv,” says the book’s co-author and editor Volodymyr Moroz. Almost immediately we came upwith an idea that this should be an edition dedicated to historical monasteries of the Order of St. Basil the Great, but those that exist nowadays. I want Ukrainians not to be just proud of their rich heritage, but also to ascertain that history is still alive and has been preserved in such monuments of human spirit as monasteries.

That is, you can visit any of these abodes,see it, pray, become spiritually renovated, and intellectuallyenriched. This is much more than a modern popularized term “religious tourism.”

Then three authors described 19 Basilian monasteries of Galician and Transcarpathian areas of modern Ukraine in their book. These are monasteries in Boronyava, Buchach, Hoshev, Dobromyl, Drogobytch, Zolochiv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Imstychiv, Krasnopushcha, Krekhiv, Lavrov, Lviv, Male Berezne, Mukachevo, Pidhirtsi, Pohinia, Ulashkivtsi, Chervonohrad.

“We’ve chosen a popular science format for the text. At the end of the book thereis a list of sources and literature, web resources and,what is important,a name index. In preparing it, I discovered a lot of interesting things. After all, when you write an essay on a particular monastery, you are running a risk to miss, for example, some activities of people in other places of historical interest. And you look up in the index, and there are sometimes just amazed how diverse the activity of one or another person was. Overall, the activities of Basilian Fathers and brethren in our history still remain a largely unexplored field, terra incognita, for the modern Ukrainian society. We just have to reopen again for ourselves those pages of the past. And, I assure, then we will be able to see ourselves in a new light, rethink many things of the past and their impact on the present.”

The authors especially hope that their work will encourage readers to make journeys across Ukraine.

“As for the plans, it is always difficult to discuss them. Of course, the subject is exciting and you want to write something about another monastery, including the lost ones,” Volodymyr Moroz concludes. “By the way, RISU already has made a study of the destroyed Basilian monastery in Stary Zbarazh.”