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The Referendum In May 1990, L’viv city council proposed a solution, which outlined a general rule for resolving conflicts related to church buildings: state representatives would conduct local referenda on each contested church and the results would determine property usage rights. A group of lay people from the old Sykhiv went to the head of the district council. The group was led by Volodmyr Thatchyk, a resident of Sykhiv who, though not a regular churchgoer, had been involved in the reorganization of the Greek Catholic parish after 1989. The group asked for St. Mykhail church to become Greek Catholic. The local administration proceeded according to city council regulations by organizing a referendum in the church. The commission administering the referendum included council deputies and representatives from the church council (dvadtsjatka). The committee prepared three hundred printed ballots on which it was written: ‘Which Church do you want St. Mykhail to be: Greek Catholic, Orthodox or other?’ Having found an official way to organize the appropriation of the church, the committee took care of the remaining details, putting announcements in the church and preparing the social club of one of the nearby factories for the referendum. Only inhabitants of the streets surrounding St. Mykhail church, mostly in old Sykhiv, would vote in the referendum, even though this very parish church in question was the only one available for the entire district of, at that time, 100,000 people. The decision to restrict the process to a few hundred people rather than to the entire district made it possible for the committee to better control the referendum. The Orthodox priests, Volodymyr Tsiopka and Volodymyr Kuzio refused to accept the procedure, keeping the church locked during the referendum, and prohibiting the posting of public announcements in the church. They also urged their parishioners to abstain from the referendum. Some people did not go in the end because they were afraid – the parish community was already split in two and the more vehement group was the newly-formed contingent of Greek Catholics. The referendum was organized without incident and many people from other parts of L’viv came to support the Greek Catholics, mobilized by priests. Even today, people remember the results of the referendum, and stress the importance of the support they received from other L’vivians. There were over two hundred votes for Greek Catholic, fourteen for Autocephalous, and seven for Orthodox, so the church was to be given to the Greek Catholics. According to the state representatives and the winning ‘party,’ the democratic exercise worked out well, but one practical question was still unsolved. The problem was how to convince the Orthodox priests to give the church to a group of lay people who claimed themselves to be the representatives of the parish community. The two priests, Fr. Tsiopka and Fr. Kuzio, refused to recognize the results of the referendum and remained in the church. The authority of the committee was limited during those times of uncertainty, and apparently they could not force the priests to relinquish the church. The actual handover happened a few weeks later through an action that was equal parts ‘official repossession’ and ‘illegal seizure’. Again, accounts of what transpire differ: Greek Catholics say that they convinced the cantor to give the church keys to Yury Hrynchyshyn, the ‘state authority’ that could mediate the transfer. Orthodox people recall that the turnover was achieved by force; a group of Greek Catholics guilefully entered the church and forced the cantor to give them the keys. That Saturday Greek Catholics occupied the church and barred the Orthodox priests and those neighbors recognized as ‘Orthodox’ from further entry into the premises. Source: Vlad Naumescu 2007. Soviet Realities and the Post-Soviet Making of Churches. In Modes of Religiosity in Eastern Christianity: Religious Processes and Social Change in Ukraine, pp. 69-106. Berlin: Lit Verlag.