UKRAINIAN WORLD CONGRESS SEEKS RENAMING KYIV STREET

“MYTROPOLYT  V. LYPKIVSKYJ  STREET”

     Acting upon the request of the Metropolitan Vasyl Lypkivskyj Ukrainian Orthodox Brotherhood from Northport, Florida, the Ukrainian World Congress has written to Mayor Leonid Chernoveckyj of Kyiv requesting that a street in Kyiv currently named “Uryckyj Street” be renamed “Mytropolyt V. Lypkivskyj Street.”

     The Orthodox Brotherhood had initiated this request in January 2003 but received a negative response from Deputy Mayor M. Poshyvanov. In April 2004 the Brotherhood repeated its request in a letter to Mayor Oleksander Omelchenko and again in August 2005. In February 2006, a member of the Kyiv Commission on street naming and site designation, Serhij Bilokin informed the Brotherhood that the Commission had decided unanimously on January 25, 2006 to rename Uryckyj Street to Mytropolyt V. Lypkivskyj. (Moisei Uryckyj was chief of the Communist secret police in Petrograd). Unfortunately, recommendations by the Commission were non-binding on the Kyiv City Council and apparently, no further action was taken.

     The UWC plans on pursuing this matter vigorously. Metropolitan Vasyl Lypkivskyj, one of the founders and the Primate of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church served in Kyiv initially as the pastor of a local parish in 1905. In 1919 he celebrated a Ukrainian-language Mass in the Mykhailivsky Sobor in Kyiv for which he was defrocked by the Russian Church.  In 1921 he was elected Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Persecuted by the Soviets, he was arrested in 1938 and executed.