Lychakiv: “Died heroically. In the struggle for independence. In a war of brother against brother”...
Late the week before last Lychakiv Cemetery became the epicenter of Lviv social and political events. The first event to take place was reburial of Yevhen Petrushevych, president of the Western Ukraine Peoples Republic (ZUNR); Dmytro Vitovsky, Minister for War, and his adjutant and unit commander of the Ukrainian Galician Army, Yulian Chuchman. The leaders of the ZUNR, who died in different years of the previous century, were originally buried in a Berlin cemetery. Yevhen Petrushevych died in 1940, while his comrades-in-arms Dmytro Vitovsky and Yulian Chuchman were killed in a car wreck as early as 1919. For all these years, the Union of Ukrainians in Germany members and the Brody-Lev Fellowship for War Graves Care (founded fifty years ago in New York) have taken care of those graves. These same organizations organized the ZUNR figures’ remains reburial. It has taken them three years and a number of letters and phone calls to Kyiv, Berlin, and Lviv to do so. Now the urns containing the remains of Dmytro Vitovsky and Yulian Chuchman are buried in the Memory Wall of the memorial to the Ukrainian Galician Army soldiers. The remains of Yevhen Petrushevych have been buried in the chapel that has been specially constructed for the purpose.
According to Yury Ferentsevych, leader of the Brody-Lev Fellowship, further plans include “returning remains of other great men of our nation from foreign lands to Ukraine,” those including, in particular, Symon Petliura, Pavlo Skoropadsky, Yevhen Konovalets, and Stepan Bandera.
Later, at the Lychakiv Cemetery, a joint Polish and Ukrainian mass was held at the war burial places of the both nations. Cardinal Liubomyr Huzar, primate of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and Lviv Roman Catholic Cardinal Maryan Yavorsky, held the service over the graves of the UHA soldiers and Young Eagles of Lwow. The joint memorial service was to testify to the reconciliation between the descendants, as well as mutual understanding and unification of the two Catholic Church rites when dealing with joint ethnic problems.
It is to say that the joint service at Lychakiv has become a kind of symbolic closing to the round table, which gathered in Lviv about 100 prominent Ukrainian and Polish public figures. It is significant that the discussion on conflicting periods in the history of the two peoples took place exactly on November 1, the day the ZUNR was proclaimed 84 years ago. Both the Ukrainians and the Poles emphasized the characteristic coincidence. Bogomila Berdychowska, one of the round table participants, believes this day to be very important for the history of Ukraine. At the same time it is tragic for the two nations’ history, for 84 years ago Ukrainian and Polish soldiers fought each other. But, according to Jacek Kuron, former leader of Poland’s Solidarity Trade Union, former Polish Minister for National Minorities, and former Lviv native, the Ukrainians and Poles “should start a new history of our relationship with what brings us closer, rather than with further reopening old wounds, since that will inevitably lead the both peoples to an impasse.”
Indeed, one of the chief points to have been discussed during the round table were discourteous expressions and not to compromise the steps by both sides concerning Polish burial places at Lychakiv. In the conference members’ opinion, it was for such actions of some Lviv and Polish official representatives that there could be a spiral in a continuing historical conflict. Jacek Kuron demonstrated his attitude to the Young Eagles claiming that the best solution of the problem would be to write on Polish graves: “Died heroically. In the struggle for independence. In a fratricidal war.”
