Pilgrimage Sites in Ukraine

A monk found the icon of the Mother of God beside a healing spring at Zarvanytsia in 1240. It became the foremost Marian shrine of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and pilgrims come to both the icon and the spring. At Berdychiv, further north in the Latin-rite heartland, Pope Benedict XIV crowned the miraculous Our Lady of Berdychiv icon in 1756.

The most recent of the three is the most unexpected. In April 1987, in the Galician village of Hrushiv, a twelve-year-old girl reported seeing the Virgin Mary above a wooden church. Half a million people came — an extraordinary gathering in the final years of Soviet rule, when the Greek Catholic Church was outlawed.