Seizures of temples. How it was: Duliby

Conflict during the seizure of the UOC temple in the village of Duliby

In June 2015, the UOC religious community of Duliby was discriminated against by the chairman of the Duliby village council Mironchuk Lesia Alekseyevna, who unlawfully seized official documents of the UOC community with the purpose of further transferring the temple to another entity – the Kiev Patriarchate.

The official motivated discriminatory actions by the fact that she as the head of the territorial community is supposed to decide who is allowed to dispose of the rural church building.

"Lesia Mironchuk is a sister of the dean of the Goshcha district of the UOC-KP," said Protopriest Sergei Timofeev, the rector of the church in the village of Duliby. "This woman, instigated by her brother, began an inter-faith war in the village. Duliby is a very small village, the population is calm and balanced, mostly older people. Young people abandon it because it is too remote from the district centre. The only centre of culture and spirituality is the church. Why did they trample it into the mud, sow discord, aggression and human strife?"

On July 7, 2015, at a meeting of the territorial community, the chairman of the Duliby village council, in support of its illegal actions against the community of the UOC, publicly announced the transfer of documents and the temple to another religious community - the Kiev Patriarchate, which subsequently led to the incitement of inter-faith strife among the local population.

"Mrs Lesia humiliated our rector at the meeting, calling him a Moscow servant," says Taras, a local resident. "She openly lied that the priest calls Putin's army to Ukraine in his prayers. It's good that among the Dulibovites there are adequate, thinking people who stopped these talks and did not support the slanderer."

Conflict around the temple in Duliby

Unable to convince all the villagers, right after the meeting the newly formed religious community of the Kiev Patriarchate illegally registered at the address of the disputed church. The church of the Most Holy Theotokos was judicially returned to the ownership of the UOC believers.

However, the inter-faith conflict in Duliby did not end there: a new aggravation occurred on June 26, 2016, when the schismatics-samosviaty tried to take away the Orthodox church, breaking into it at the beginning of the divine service. Anatoly Mironchuk, the dean of the Goshcha district of the UOC-Kiev Patriarchate, led the assault, along with his wife, as well as his sister Lesia Mironchuk, who was a former village head.

According to eyewitnesses, in the morning, as soon as the rector of the church Protopriest Sergei Timofeev entered the altar and said the first words, local radically-minded men broke into the church and began to pull people out onto the street. They beat and pushed the acolyts who forbade entering the Holy of Holies. Because of the "unrestrained desire" of the schismatics to pray, on that day the young man got injured in the head and an 80-year-old woman, who was dragged out by the hands and thrown out of the church.

In total, the conflicts around the temple in the village of Duliby took place over the course of three years: four times the schismatics tried to break into the church, but the believers of the UOC counteracted them, so the temple is still the property of the religious community of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

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