Chernihiv City Council names street after first UOC-KP "patriarch"

Mstyslav Skrypnyk. Photo: raskolam.net

On February 8, 2024, the Chernihiv City Council renamed Stratylat Street (Michael Stratylat, organizer of the partisan movement in the Chernihiv region during World War II), giving it the name of the first "patriarch" of the UOC-KP Mstyslav Skrypnyk. This was reported by the press service of the city council.

According to the authors of the message, the decision was dictated by the "need to protect the interests of the country."

In the explanatory note to the draft decision on changing the names of this and 20 other streets and three alleys in Chernihiv, it is said that thanks to these renamings, "streets and other objects become 'incorporeal monuments' to those persons and events that are defined as outstanding in the current symbolic context."

Mstyslav (Stepan Ivanovych) Skrypnyk was born in 1898 in Poltava, studied at the Orenburg Officer School, and served in the Russian Imperial Army. In 1917, he joined the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR), and then became an aide-de-camp to his uncle, Simon Petliura.

From 1941 to 1944, Stepan Skrypnyk was a representative of the German Reich Ministry for the Eastern Territories with the Army Group South and a trusted person of the occupational government for civil administration. In the occupied Rovno, he published the newspaper "Volyn", which glorified Hitler and his army.

In 1942, Skrypnyk became a "monk" with the name Mstyslav, a "deacon", a "priest", and soon after, a "bishop" of the UAOC. According to contemporaries, he was involved in the persecution of clergy of the canonical Church who refused to collaborate with the Nazis or participate in the schism.

In 1944, Skrypnyk went to Canada. In 1990, he was elected "Patriarch of Kiev and All Ukraine" by the UAOC in the St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, and in 1992, at the "unification council" of the UAOC and supporters of the former Metropolitan Filaret Denysenko, Mstyslav Skrypnyk was proclaimed "patriarch" of the newly created UOC-KP. A year later, he died in the USA.

Earlier, it was reported that in Kharkiv, Greek Catholics proposed renaming a street after Cardinal Joseph Slipyi.

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