Kyiv to build memorial for Orthodox patriarch

KYIV - Acting Kyiv Mayor Oleksander Omelchenko has pledged to build a memorial on the sidewalk outside the walls of St. Sophia Cathedral where Patriarch Volodymyr of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyiv Patriarchate was buried nearly a year ago, Reuters reported on June 18.

Mr. Omelchenko has ordered city funds to be used for a marble monument with a cross and columns on the late patriarch's grave in the pavement, according to Reuters. Approximately $71,000 (in karbovantsi) has been allocated.

Mourners and church activists were denied permission by the national government last year to lay the patriarch to rest on cathedral grounds, and riot police beat and tear-gassed funeral participants, among them members of Parliament and elderly women.

Mr. Omelchenko said the monument would be ready for the first anniversary of the patriarch's burial. "This is not an honored location for a Ukrainian patriarch," he said. "But we must try to correct this wrong. There is no other place to put him in Kyiv."

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, June 23, 1996, No. 25, Vol. LXIV

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