WWII Occupation, Holocaust & Mass Killings

1919 - 1939

The 1921 Peace of Riga divided Volhynia between Poland and the USSR; Poland established the Volhynian Voivodeship with Lutsk as its capital and launched an active Polonization campaign. Mass settlement of Polish military colonists (osadniks) on formerly Ukrainian land created a visible colonial layer. Beginning in 1937, the Polish government used religion as a tool for Polonization, attempting to convert the Orthodox population to Roman Catholicism. The 'revindication' campaign destroyed or closed Orthodox churches—transferring them to Catholic use, tearing them down, or converting them to public buildings. This systematic destruction of Orthodox sacred space directly affected the ritual calendar of Ukrainian-speaking communities, who saw their parish churches—the physical anchors of their festival cycle—taken from them. The Jewish population of Polish Volhynia reached approximately 300,000 in the early 1930s, maintaining shtetl communities with their own festival rhythms alongside the contested Christian calendar. In Rivne, a Polish garrison town, and in Lutsk, the Voivodeship capital, Polish cultural dominance was inscribed in administrative buildings, Catholic churches, and the osadnik settlements that reshaped the rural landscape. The memory of the revindication campaign shaped Ukrainian resentment and would later be cited as context for the 1943 mass killings—though it does not explain or justify them. What you see today in the region's surviving Orthodox and Catholic church buildings is a palimpsest of this era's confessional contestation.

1945 - 1991

Soviet rule imposed a triple transformation on Volhynia-Polissya's festival landscape: confessional suppression, cultural folklorization, and environmental catastrophe. The Soviet government closed approximately 15,000 Orthodox churches across Ukraine between 1958 and 1964 (the Khrushchev campaign), banned public religious ritual, and executed the 1930s intelligentsia who had documented folk culture—the 'Executed Renaissance' that severed the cultural transmission chain. Simultaneously, Soviet cultural policy systematically 'folklorized' living traditions: stripping sacred rites of religious content, reclassifying them as secular 'customs,' and staging sanitized versions for state festivals. What appears today as a 'revived folk festival' may be a Soviet-era reconstruction that replaced the original ritual function. Soviet ethnography also imposed national categories (Ukrainian or Belarusian) on tutejsi communities, distorting local self-identification. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster created an exclusion zone covering part of Ukrainian Polissya in Kyiv and Zhytomyr oblasts; entire villages were permanently evacuated, severing the ritual transmission chain for communities that were among the most archaic in the region. Any festival tradition rooted in the northern Polissya marshlands may have lost its living practitioners to Chernobyl displacement, surviving only in ethnographic recordings rather than practice. Yet the Soviet era also created the heritage-preservation infrastructure—national reserves like Ancient Chernihiv (established 1967)—that would later become the physical basis for post-independence cultural revival.

1795 - 1917

The Second Partition of Poland (1793) and Third Partition (1795) transferred almost all of Volhynia to the Russian Empire, which created the Volhynia Governorate and launched a systematic campaign of confessional unification. The Russian government forcibly liquidated the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, transferring its buildings to the Russian Orthodox Church; the Roman Catholic Diocese of Lutsk was suppressed by Catherine II. The new Volhynia Eparchy of the Russian Orthodox Church presented Orthodoxy in the region as an ancient uninterrupted tradition, erasing the Uniate interlude and the forced conversions that had brought these parishes into being. This era also incorporated Volhynia into the Pale of Settlement, making it one of the most densely Jewish regions in the world—by the 1897 Census, 395,782 Jews constituted 13.21% of the Governorate's population. Czech agricultural colonists arrived from the late 1860s (Kvasyliv became a Czech center), and German Mennonites had been present since 1783, constituting 5.7% of the population by 1897. The Imperial government built the Tarakaniv Fortress (1860–1890) to guard the Kyiv-Lviv railway, a concrete symbol of the new military-administrative order. Festival practice under the Empire meant that the Julian calendar became the only officially sanctioned Orthodox calendar, while Roman Catholic and Jewish communities maintained their own feast-day cycles under legal restriction. The Uniate festival layers were physically destroyed—churches handed to Orthodox parishes—meaning that some current Orthodox celebrations may contain Uniate-era ritual traces unrecognized because that interlude has been systematically erased from local memory.

From 1991

Post-1991 independence allowed the revival of religious and folk festival practice, but the revival was often a reconstruction from ethnographic literature rather than from living tradition—the Soviet suppression had broken the cultural transmission chain. Lutsk's 'Christmas in Lutsk' festival explicitly seeks 'new Christmas songs with Volyn color' (Волинський колорит), raising the question of whether this 'color' is living tradition, archival revival, or contemporary composition. The 2023 OCU adoption of the Revised Julian calendar created a literal split in festival timing: OCU parishes (predominantly in urban areas) celebrate Christmas on December 25 and other fixed feasts on Gregorian-aligned dates, while UOC-MP parishes (more common in rural and northern areas) retain the old Julian calendar (Christmas on January 7). The same festival now has two living versions in the same community, with the 'old' dates carrying the weight of ethnographic continuity and the 'new' dates carrying the weight of Ukrainian national alignment. The Ivana Kupala festival in Chernihiv blends Polissyan ritual elements (bonfires, wreaths, herb customs) with modern community celebration—whether it draws on living Polissyan practice, Soviet folklorized scripts, or post-2014 national revival framing remains an open question. Post-2022, the full-scale Russian invasion has generated a second wave of revival framed as cultural resistance, with folk festivals explicitly positioned as defiance of Russian cultural erasure. The Korosten Deruny Festival celebrates regional culinary identity through potato-pancake competitions, folk performances, and shared meals. The Volyn Heritage Eco-Route connects heritage sites across Volyn and Rivne oblasts by car, bicycle, or foot, making the region's layered past navigable for the first time. Walk these landscapes and you will feel the calendar split in your bones: the same village celebrating Christmas twice, thirteen days apart, each date claiming continuity from a different past.