Ternopil Regional Council Deputies Call to Return Pochayiv Monastery to Reserve

TERNOPIL — At the session of February 11, 2010, the deputies of the Ternopil Regional Council addressed the prime minister of Ukraine with a demand to cancel the decision, according to which the Pochayiv Monastery was excluded from the reserve, to which the shrine belonged before 2003, informs ZIK information agency.

“The Pochayiv Monastery has become a center of Ukrainophobia. The liturgies are conducted in Russian, literature is published in Russian. The monastery’s monks are hostile towards representatives of other denominations, particularly, the Orthodox of the Kyivan Patriarchate,” noted the deputy head of the Regional Council, Oleh Boberskyi.    

At the previous session, the deputies set up a temporary committee, which studied the process of the transfer of the monastery and its activity.

According to the report, the members of the committee found out that illegal extraction of building materials is carried out in the monastery’s territory. In addition, the police constantly identify in the district foreign citizens staying there in violation of the migration law. Usually, they are citizens of Russia, Moldova, and other CIS countries.

The deputies also were concerned about a possibility of stay of representatives of Russian secret services on the territory of the monastery. However, the members of the temporary committee were not able to confirm or refute this information, reports Gazeta.ua.

In 2003, the buildings of the monastery were passed to the community of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate with free rent until 2052.