My Daughter Ukraine: Apparitions of Mary

Apparitions of Mary in Ukraine

Kiev (Ukraine). In 1073, the icon of Kievo-Petcherskaia was carried to a church in Kiev. According to the accounts, it was painted by artists to whom the Virgin appeared in the church of the Blachernes in Constantinople. Mary is said to have given them the gold they needed to decorate the church where she wished to be placed.

POCHAIEV (Ukraine). On April 17, 1198, there is a presumed apparition of the Virgin to a woman who was tending the flock and to a monk. Some miracles and healings are reported. A monastery of the Order of Saint Basil is built in honor of the Virgin. Later, in the same town, around 1240, the Virgin appears in a pillar of fire on Mount Pochaiev, 360 km west of Kiev, before the monks of the monastery of the Dormition who were fleeing Kiev, invaded by enemy troops. The imprint of the Virgin’s right foot, filled with healing water, is said to have been found on the spot.

Centuries later, on July 23, 1675, the monastery of the Dormition is besieged by the troops of the Tatars. The monks sing the hymn of the Akathistos to the Virgin. Suddenly, they see the Mother of God above their church, accompanied by several angels, in a great light, with a long veil in her hand. The invaders flee.

In Hrushiv, in the year 1840, a cholera epidemic broke out in this locality and claimed many victims. A woman dreamed of Our Lady asking her to clean out a poisoned well: Have a Mass celebrated and death will cease to strike the village. And so it happened: the epidemic ceased, and near the spring, in 1855, a small shrine dedicated to the Most Holy Trinity was erected. In 1901, the Holy See granted pilgrims an indulgence on the occasion of certain feasts.

On May 12, 1914, there is a supposed apparition of the Virgin to twenty-two people. A message prophesies the imminent outbreak of the First World War, punishments for the world, and the loss of Ukraine’s sovereignty for eight years, after which faith will triumph and the country will be free once again.

In 1958, during the communist period, the shrine was closed, abandoned, and deconsecrated, but the pilgrims continued to go there.

In Kiev, in the first decades of the twentieth century, a young woman wonders about her vocation and receives these words: Endure, endure, from beginning to end. You will not live in a monastery. You will not have money with you. You will live on what you receive. You will not have a roof! This account has come down to us through an Orthodox student in the Soviet Union, who recalls in his diary a meeting with this wandering nun in front of the church of Saint Andrew in Kiev in 1958.

In Seredne, on December 20, 1953, a girl named Hamsya was praying in the parish church when she had a vision: I saw the Holy Virgin standing, clothed in a white dress with a wide sash of blue cloth. Twelve stars formed a circle around her head, which shone in the sky. It was impossible to gaze upon the splendor of her beauty. The seer adds that she saw a place where there were small pools of clear water, and that she heard: My daughter, my daughter, my daughter, see what an abundance of graces I possess. But I have no one to grant them to, for there are many girls and boys who turn away from me, and no one asks me for anything in this jubilee year. We recall that Pope Pius XII, with the Encyclical Fulgens Corona, had proclaimed for the Church the first Marian Year of its history.

I wanted to obtain a great pardon for sinners. Disaster is upon you as in the days of Noah. Destruction will not come upon you with water, but with fire. An immense tongue of fire will destroy the nations that are sinners before God. Since the birth of the world, there has never been so great a fall as today. It is the reign of Satan. I will dwell on this mountain from which I see the whole universe and all sinners, and from here I will distribute my graces. Whoever comes to repent of his sins and receives this water with faith will be healed by me in soul and body.

On December 22, 1954, the Virgin announced: My daughter, my daughter Ukraine, I have come to you; you are the one most reduced to slavery, you are the one who has suffered most for the faith in Christ. I have come toward you!

Again in 1987, in Hrushiv, on April 26, 40 km from Lviv, in front of a chapel that had not been used for about thirty years, eleven-year-old Maria Kizyne had apparitions of the Virgin. According to the seer’s account: I immediately saw, on one of the sides of the octagonal tower above the bulbous dome of the chapel, a figure: a woman in black. The frightened seer ran back inside, adds the account of the girl’s mother. In the following days, some witnesses see above the chapel an image resembling the icon of the Virgin with the Child Jesus in her arms, glittering, surrounded by light.

She rose above the chapel and then rose still higher into the sky, reports one witness. The Virgin spoke only with the children and would disappear when the adults appeared. She taught the little ones the foundations of the faith and how to pray. She appeared one last time in an aura of light, with Christ in her arms, miraculously leaving her Son imprinted on the glass of the chapel, explains another witness.

A message was delivered: My daughter, my daughter Ukraine, I have come to meet you. You are the one most reduced to slavery, the one who has suffered most for the faith in Christ. During the following weeks, many people also see her. From May 9 to 12, Josyp Terelya, born in Ukraine in the Carpathian region in October 1943, a political prisoner for twenty-three years, testifies that he had seven apparitions of Mary:

In February 1972, I was in prison. The room was freezing cold. I was in pain down to the tips of my hair. A hanging lamp lit the room. I took off the mesh and tried to warm my hands, but the guard saw me through the door. He turned off the light. I could not move a single limb. I lay down on the bed to die. At that moment, I felt the warm touch of a woman’s hand, sweet as milk. I was growing warm. I felt a little warmth in the room as well. I thought it was a hallucination or that I was going to die. But it was then that I heard the voice: “You called me and I have come to you. You do not believe that it is I?” At that moment, I saw a young woman in front of me. It was she, for the first time. In all, I saw the Mother of God seven times: once in prison, then six times in Hrushiv. I did not see her hair. Her head was covered with a veil. That first time she said to me: You will not be freed from this prison. You have gone only half the way, but do not be afraid, I am with you.

I got up and began to walk. I was warm. I took off my shirt and remained in only an undershirt. The guard watched me through the door, astonished. I saw her, while it was night, as I see the reader now. Others saw as I did. I thought I had heard her voice. She asked us to pray, to teach children prayer and the Rosary, so as to convert even those who do not believe.

On May 9, 1987, I set out for Hrushiv. I went there believing that I would see nothing. But when I arrived, we saw an unusual light that I could not explain. There were many people there before dawn. I stayed until May 12. A team of filmmakers from Moscow was there. I heard again the message she had addressed to Seredne in Ukraine, a century after Lourdes, on December 22, 1954: Ukraine, my daughter, I have come to you.

Josyp Terelya, a militant of the clandestine Greek-Catholic Church, the son of communist parents, was imprisoned four times for a total of twenty-three years and four months, with rare moments of freedom between 1962 and 1987. In that period, he married and became the father of a family with three children. On May 13, 1987, some television viewers in the region were following a broadcast about these events. Suddenly, many are said to have seen the Virgin appear on their television screen, at the place that was watched by the police. The Metropolitan of Lviv kept his distance from the matter and opened no inquiry.

The communist tormentors offered to release him from prison if he revealed what had really happened. But his answer was always the same: I saw the Mother of God. This kept him in detention, since he was considered a fanatic. Josyp Terelya remained in exile in America and met Pope Saint John Paul II. These apparitions had an extraordinary echo, in contrast with the modesty of the seer: an ordinary girl. The time was the threshold of perestroika; a discreet relaxation was beginning. The police were there, but did not intervene when the crowd poured into that place. If in earlier times in Russia the apparitions were immediately crushed, by the triumph of pressure instead of repression, these were the first in which the courage of the faithful, thirsting in the wake of seventy years of atheism, combined with the new and enigmatic moderation of the police, created a new situation with international repercussions.

The phenomenon of Marian apparitions and their discernment by the Church is treated in the encyclical Redemptoris Mater of John Paul II, which underlines the role of Mary as sign and maternal presence in the history of peoples.

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