Ukrainian Epiphany in Southeast Poland

Prwmysl , a s m a l l i s h c i ty i n sout heast Po l a n d , c lose l o t h e Ukra i n i a n border, i s t h e cen tre i n l'o land of lhc recent ly rcl cga l iscd Greek Cathol ic Church, which i s a l 1 1 1 osl excl u s i ve ly U k ra i n i a n i n J n c m lJC r;; h i p. 'l'l l i ;; paper begi n:; w i th a n ou tl i n e o f t h i s C h n rch's Jorrla n r i l u : d s , a s ou;;c rvcd d u r i nga rece n t fic ldlr ip . Th i s i s fi 1 l l owcd b y a s ket. ch ol ' long--t e rm proce;;scs o f Lal i n i zat ion and t h e nat ion a l i zat ion o f rol i gi o n . This part o f Cen t ra l l�u rope has i n the cou rse of this century l u rched from polyd h n ic e m p i res Lo monoe t h n ic ' n a t ion -s t a les', but con lt! m porary Po l a n d i s not f] u i t e a s monoet. h n ic as was somet i mes c lai med i n the soc i a l i st years . The ecu men ical and m u l l icu l t u r: d i m ag-es g-en e ra ted in Prze mys l by the rece nt ly rev i ved Jorda n r ilu ab conceal the pressures brough l lo bear in rcccnl years upon Lhc c i ty';; Ukra i n i a n m i nor ity, wh ich was ;; u pposed to h ave been el i m i nated i n 1 947 . So me o rt . hc sharpest post co m m u n ist con fl ict s h ave concerned the propert y c i a i m s of t he G reck Catho l i c C h u rch . The paper fi1cuscs on the conlmvcrsy LhaL has surrounded just one building in Przemysl, where the political, legal and even a rch i tectu ra l iss ues a rc espec i a l ly co m p lex, in order lo high l ight more general soc i a l a n d pol i ti ca l prob l e m s fac i n g European soc ieties , such as the long-term consequences of ethnic cleansing and the compatibility of democracy and multicul­ t u ra l i ;; m . l n a few yean; L i m e l 'rzc mys l w i l l beco me a fi.·onlicr city ofthc E u ropean U n i o n ; docs th i s E u rope h ave space for a rel igion which , though Christian a n cl Cath o lic, differs markedly from the western European mainstream? Finally, the paper pro b l cmati zes the vocabu l a ry c urrently available in anthropology to ad­ d ress s i tuations s uch as th is , incl uding the concepts ofcthnicity/cthnic group an d culture i tsel f.

as Ma n ifi•st.at.ion ) hns cons ide rnble i m porta nce as murking the closure of" the Christmas cycle. The p rincipal populur u:;:;uciutiun in western Chri:;tiunity hu:; been with the Magi, the Three Ki n g:; who came bea rin g their gifts of myrrh, fr ankincense and gold to the baby .Jesus. The lea:;t is popul ady known by this name in a number orJanguage:;, i ncl ud ing Pol ish (Swi�t.o 1hech Kr6li) and German (das Heiligedrei hun igs(est), though each ofthese languages also has a more formal te nn, Ol�ja. wien ie and Er scheinu ng . But the least seems l arg·e ly to have lost its former significance in popular culture in western Europe, even fur practising Catholics.'' Przemysl on 6th .January conforms to this western European norm, though its many Ro man Catholic churches may be a little fu ller than usual . Things are different, however, on 19th .January. The Greek Catholics, like the Orthodox, fo llow the Julian calendar, so the whole Christmas cycle takes place two weeks later than the Roman Catholic cycle. Moreover the rituals and popular associations diffe r rad ically. In place of the Three Kings, a relatively late western development, the Epiphany ritu als of eastern Christianity continue to give pride of place to Christ's baptism in the River Jordan. The fe ast of the Epiphany is therefore known simply as Jordan. For Greek Catholics this is a day when attendance at mass is com pulsory, but the most important element is the praying and blessing that take place after the 152 service at the ba nk of" the nea rest river. Some Greek Cutholic:; say that th i::; feast is even 1nore important than Christmas (though all agree that it i::; le::;s i mportant than Easter).
Let me summarise b rie.ll y the main eve n ts as witnessed and explai ned to me in Przemysl in 1998, when .Jordan fe ll on a Monday. The com ing-holiday was marked by a large social gath ering on the preceding Saturday in the Dam Naruduwy ('National House') ofthe city's Ukrain ian commun ity, in which carol:;, folk singing and ::;hort. plays were performed, mostly by schoolchildren and young male novices from th e Basilian order. Th e religious significance of th e occasion was highlighted in welcoming speeches and prayers led by the parish priest and the Metropolitan himself. Some ofthe scenes enacted on the stage were religious, and they i ncluded a rendering of the story of the Three Kings. However there was also much good hu mour and mirth of a purely secular nature. The language used was modern standard Ukraini an, but the repertoire included Ukrainian ver sions of popular international carols such as Stille Nacht (S ilent Night). Patriotic sentiments towards the Ukrainian homeland were evoked several times, especially in the closing prayers.
The only fo od served to the audience of some 300 was a simple sweet dish called hutia, made fr om wheat and raisins. Had there been no communal evening, I was told, many fa milies would have made this dish at home; indeed Kutia Festivities at the Ukrai nian National House: the Three Kings bring their Gifts.
Procession through the Market Square to the river.
Pontifical Epiphany Mass in the Greek Catholic Cathedral. many had made it at home for Christmas Eve, tho other celebration when lw tia is customary.
On the following day, Sunday 18th January, all throe masses in tho Greek Catholic cathe dral were well attended. I caught tho end of th e afternoon service, which was fo llowed by a ritual known as 'tho small blessing of the wa ter'. This involved relatively brief prayers over a large pan of plain water positioned in fr ont of the iconostasis. I was told that this was mainly intended for those who, for whatever reason, would be unable to attend the main Jordan rituals on the fo llowing day. At the end of the prayers a number of people filled empty con tainers they had brought along with them by dipping them into th e bowl of water. On this eve ofthe fe ast some fa milies observed a fa st which they broke only with a large evening meal: this would typically comprise bortsch fo llowed by Ruski dumplings and kutia.
The fo llowing morning the cathedral was fu ll well before the 9.00 am start of the main ('pon tifical') service. To wards eleven o'clock the en tire congregation, led by the Metropolitan, ac companied by the city's Roman Catholic Arch bishop and another Roman Catholic Bishop, processed through the central streets of the city for approximately one kilometre to an empty green site on the bank of the River San. Here a sort of wooden podium had been constructed in the fa st-flowing river. The clergy stepped onto it Home holy waLer at. !.he end of th e riverside ceremonies. and led a fu rther halfhour of praying and ritual performances, focused around another large pan of water. A crowd of perhaps two thousand people participated on tho bank beh ind them, while fu rther onlookers wore positioned on the opposite bank of the river. Candles and crosses were dipped into the bowl of water, the loading celebrants made crosses above it in the air with their breath, and two white doves were released into the air. The celebrants then drank some water (this was taken not fr om the pan or fr om the river but fr om a small thermos flask they had brought along). There was then a fr ightful rush as the clergy stepped aside and members of the congregation swarmed fo rward to fill their receptacles (including the odd vodka bot tle) with holy water fr om the pan. Some avoided this serum and took the water they needed directly fr om the river itself. A few people drank the river water. The water is collected to serve as holy water in the home throughout the year -it should be sprinkled at once into all corners to bring prosperity. In the past it was used medicinally by fa mily members, and written accounts record that drops of this water were customarily sprinkled onto animals when they left their winter stables for the spring pasture. Other written sources embellish aspects offolk custom which grew up around Jordan. Since the San was often fr ozen at this time, it was sometimes necessary to dig holes in the ice before the blessing. H was also common to erect large crORHes out of ice.r• I am not a folklorist and my primary interest lies neither in these f(.,lk customs nor in the theological significance of the ritual. As a social anthropol ogist I am i nterested in the contempo rary sociological and political aspects of reli gious identity in this city, in how Jordan fi gures in changing relationships between Roman and Greek Catholics, Poles and Ukrainians. As we walked back towards the city centre at the end ofthe rituals, an elderly Ukrainian told me that he remembered how, in the 1930s as now in 1998, Roman Catholics had joined Greek Cath olics in th eir procession . Certainly th e total numbers participating this year exceeded most assessments of the number of Greek Catholics in the city. Apparently at least some Roman Catholics also took water fr om the pan or fr om the San, for use in their home during the fo llow ing twelve months. I was told that the example set by the Roman Catholic Archbishop and many of his faithful is emulated by the Greek Catholic Metropolitan and many ordinary mem bers of his Church when they process with the Roman Catholics on their most conspicuous public fe ast, the Assumption (15th August).
This was how things were done in the city before 1945, and this was how things were done again since 1990, when socialist prohibitions of public religious processions were finally lifted.
Are we then witnessing in postcommunist

History
Like most anthropologists I tend to be more interested in how 'ordinary people' construct their pasts than in questions of fa ct and inter pretation as debated by professional histori ans.6 But of course the two are sometimes close ly related, and the writing of nationalist histo ries by scholars over the last century or so has had tremendous impact upon the popular con structions. These processes continued after the collapse of the Polish state in the middle of the eight eenth century, when Przemysl along with the rest of southern Poland passed into Habsburg hands. By the end of the nineteenth century Przemysl was the second city (aft er Lemberg/ L'viv) of Eastern Galicia and a major military stronghold of the Austrians. Galicia was also the main stronghold in the later nineteenth century of both the Polish and the Ukrainian national movements. It suited the Austrians to play them off against each other. Literacy rates rose sharply and both movements enjoyed con siderable fr eedom to promote nationalist histo ries. But the province remained underdevel oped economically and millions were constrained to emigrate, mostly to North America, in move ments which also played an important role in the dissemination of the sense of belonging to a people, to a nation. For several critical decades the most important agent in spreading Ukrain ian nationalism among the predominantly ru ral population was the only intelligentsia avail able at this time to east Slavs, the Greek Cath olic clergy (Himka 1984).

Przemysl saw bitter fighting between Russia and Austria-Hungary during the First World
War, which was fo llowed by the re-emergence of a Polish state. Ukrainian nationalists estab lished a Republic ofWestern Ukraine and there was fi ght ing between Po . les and UkrninianR in Przemy. � l , where u number or Poli�:�h �:�choolboys were killed, and (much more �:�eriou�:�ly) in Lem berg. The Poli�:�h army wus rnuch the �:�tronger and Ea�:�tern Galicia wa�:� efTectively incorpora t ed by ro rce into the new Poli�:�h state. Ukraini ans numbered about 16% or the total popula tion in 1 929, and other minorities, among whom Jews were the most numerou::;, added up to roughly the same number ('J'oma�:�zewski 1985). This ::;tate was th us ::;till signi ficantly polyeth nic, a long way from the ideal or the homoge nous 'nation -stale'. Continued political action by disallccted Ukrainian�; brought repress ion fr om Warsaw, which also sought to undermine the power or the Greek C ath olic Church, now more than ever perceived as the national church of the Ukrainian people. There was pressure to end the diversity of lhc Agra ri an Age once and for all: for example, Polish-speaking Greek Catholics were targeted and told that they were really Poles and that they should not be taken in by Ukrainian nationalist propaganda. At this time .Roman Catholic Poles and Jews were the largest components in the population of the city of Przemysl, while Greek Catholic Ukrain ians, though weaker in the city, still predomi nated in the surrounding rural areas. There are evident signs of increasing tension in the 1930s, e.g. in the construction by Poles of a monument to honour the schoolboys killed in 1918, and in boycotts of Jewish shops that were observed both by Poles and by Ukrainians. Nevertheless it is striking to observe that in this decade every other Christian marriage registered in the city was a mixed marriage.7 The decade that fo llowed the outbreak of war that it was providing support to terrorists. About 300,000 people were dispersed in small groups to the fo rmer German territories, with normally no more than 3 fa milies allowed to settle together, to ensure that they would al ways be outnumbered by Poles. They were deprived ofbasic civil rights, including the right to travel back to their native villages and towns. Their homes were allocated to others or de stroyed.8 During the rest of the socialist era Przemysl was quiet and stagnant. Its population soon recovered to pre-war levels and there was a steady process of rural-urban migration. How ever, Przemysl was overtaken by .Rzesz6w not only as a centre for state administration but also as a recipient of industrial and educational investment. Only the ecclesiastical sector con tinued to flourish. With the elimination of the Jews and the Greek Catholics, this now consist ed almost exclusively of the .Roman Catholic Church. However, after the first of a series of major crises that were to hit the People's .Re public, in 1956 a Greek Catholic parish was re-established under ihe protection or the domi nant Church. Here and in a h a ndful or other locations, most or ih e rn in the remote former German area:-; io which the Greek Cathol ics had been deported, surviving clergy were able io practise their own riLes within Roman Cath ol ic buildings . Some Greek Catholics converted to O rthodoxy in order to be able io enjoy more fr eedom and religious practices almost identi cal io their own (ihe Orthodox enjoyed state support in many ru ral localities of ihe region; after the formation ol"ihcir parish in Przemysl in 1984 they were even allowed io process publicly ai Jordan, which ihe Greek Catholics did not dare to do until 1989). However, wherev er a Greek Catholic priest and services were available, most people remained loyal to their church. In Przemysl the great majority attend ed Sunday masses in the former Jesuit building named after the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Official ly it was a Roman Catholic fo undation known as the Garrison Church; in reality it catered mosily for Greek Catholics and it played a major role in the consolidation of their new community.
Who were these parishioners? Officially all

Postcommunist Civil Society
The concept of civil society has been at the basis of some of the most pervasive perceptions ofthe end of communism, both within Eastern Eu rope and in external analyses of the region.
Civil :;ncicty, in this contempora ry usage, has an unambigunu:;ly po:-;itivc v alency. The civil society i:; the oppo:;ite ofih e total i tariu n society, it is one in which individual citizen:; enjoy fu ll rights of' u:;sociation and eq uality bef(>re the law. A good deal of' the aid flowing Eastern Europe has been channel led th rough interna tional non-government al organi sa ti on s and expliciily targeted at the promotion of such organil:ations, since these are held to epitomise the spirit of civil society (Wedcl l998).
There is much irony in the trajectory ofihis concept since its first theorisation in a prein dustrial era. Civ il society (Buruerliche Gesell schaft) was also used in opposi ti on to the state by Hege l and Ma rx, but civil society was not the positively evaluated pole in their work. Civil society was rather seen as the sphere of socially divisive egoism, equated with the sphere of the market, which was to be transcended by state societal integration. Neo-Marxists in the twen tieth century, notably Gramsci, led the way in drawing attention to the integrating aspects of civil society. These currents culminated in the writings of Eastern European dissidents who theorised an opposition between civil society and the repressive socialist state. In Western Europe Jurgen Habermas tried to find a way around the definitional problems by introduc ing the term Zivilgesellschaft in place of Bil.rger liche Gesellschaft to denote this positive con temporary sense of civil society; but it can hardly be claimed that he offers a convincing resolution of the theoretical issues. 10 I prefer to fo llow Hegel and Marx, and also to draw on another important nineteenth century contribution, that of Tocqueville. To cqueville distinguished 'political society' fr om both the state and civil society. It is worth differentiat ing a little fu rther and distinguishing between political elites at the national level, in this case Warsaw, and political society at the local level, in this case Przemysl. Most theories of democra cy take it for granted that continuity between these levels can be secured through universal suffrage and representative institutions. Post communist Poland has indeed instituted an impressively democratic Constitution. Govern ments in Warsaw have also been anxious to protect the rights of'national and ethnic minor-ities'. The Ministry of' Culture in Wa rsaw ha::; ta ken the ini tiati ve in promoting bette r rela tions with Ukraine, e.g. by moving the bi-annu al Festival of Ukrainian Culture from its locu tion on the Baltic coast, where it was inaccessi ble to Ukrainians, to Przemysl. Political society in Przemysl, however, did not welcome this initiative. On the contrary the mayor and m os t local politicians did their best to prevent this relocation, arguing that the great majority of the city's inhabitants did not want this Festiv a l in their city.
More important in Przemysl than the new national political parties were the activities of a mass of new and ostensibly independent asso ciations, the sort of development so attractive to civil society theorists. Unfortunately the most prominent of these all turned out to have rather narrow, anti-Ukrainian and anti-socialist polit ical agendas. They were associations of Ve ter ans who had experienced Soviet camps in Sibe ria, Ukrainian terrorism in Vo lhynia in the 1940s, and so on. Many members were not natives ofPrzemysl but Poles 'repatriated' after 1945 from the fo rmer eastern region. The most dynamic was the 'Association for the Commem oration of the Przemysl Eaglets' of 1918-9, i.e. the schoolboys who gave their lives in the fight ing for an independent Poland at the end ofthe First World War. This Association was fo rmed to rebuild the statue that had been destroyed on Nazi orders in 1940, and it did so in a grand style. Far fr om limiting its activities to this one cause, it went on to take up anti-Ukrainian issues generally. It and other associations were able to use the new fr eedoms of the media to whip up local public opinion against any initia tive that they perceived to be in the interests of the minority, such as the organisation of the Festival, the restitution of property, or the erec tion of monuments to Ukrainian victims of Polish violence half a century ago. There was no countervailing fo rce to this welter of right-wing nationalism which came to dominate local political society in Przemysl as soon as communist controls were lifted. The Ukrainian minority was much too small to mount any effective resistance. It is nonethe less hard to explain how these Ve terans' associ ations, with barely any fo rmal representation in the city council, were nonetheless in cl'f ect able to impose their ag-end a upon other parties. When the l eader of' the Association for the Co m m e moration of' the Pr:wmy�l Eaglet:; ran fo r public ol'fice he pol l ed very badly. Yet his o rganizati on an d a handfu l of others with over lappi n g me mberships managed to constrain all the acti v i ties ofihc elected politici ans by cease less manipulation uf nation alist discourse, by accusing anyone who disagreed with them of not bein g 'real Pules'. For members of the mi n o rity Ukrainian group, thi:; trans ition to anew po litical society meant f�tr more day-to-day pres sure than they had experienced in the last three decades of communism .
Civil society al so re-emerged in Przemy�l in something like its classical fo rm in the realm of the economy. Here the wishes of Warsaw elites seemed to be more in accord with those of local people, who welcomed the early decisions of post-communist governments to relax controls over cross-border trade. As a result a border which had been l argely closed to individual or fam ilial entrepreneurial initiatives was now suddenly open to every possible flow of goods and people. Dramatically worsening economic conditions in Ukraine ensured that much of the trade consisted of Ukrainian citizens taking anything they could lay their hands on to the nearest Polish bazaars. Even tiny amounts of convertible currency could help them to survive at home. As unemployment increased in Przemysl in the wake ofthe government's 'shock therapy' programme, the bazaar also assisted many Poles in their own survival strategies. In time the liberalization of trade almost certainly did assist some to gain the benefits visualised by national elites, as long-term mutually bene ficial trading partnerships were fo rmed by small businessmen. There are no statistics to sum up all this new activity, but it is estimated that, eight years after the collapse of the centrally planned economy and the launch of the 'Balce rowicz Plan' as the optimum route to the new market economy, as much as one third of the Przemysl economy is nowadays directly or indi rectly dependent on small-scale trade with Ukraine.11 There is little reliable information either as to the effect the much increased contact with 160 and visibili ty of Ukrainians in Przemy�l has had on Polish pe rceptions of' the other group, including the Ukrainian minority within their own city. However, these markets arc !:lome times dirty, insanitary places, and many of the visiting Ukrainians did not have the resources to pay for respectable accommodation, even if Przemysl had had such accommodation availa ble to ofl'er them; some of them no doubt en gaged in activities that brought them up against the law (not so much organised crime, of which tho city seems to have stayed remarkably f'ree, as infringement of labour market regulations by working on a casual basis when not entitled to do so). Some sociological research on stereo types in the town (Jestal 1995) confirms the impression I fo rmed when visiting these new markets: that contact of this sort does little to promote better inter-ethnic relations, but rath er accentuates negative stereotypes, in this case that of the 'dirty trader' (brudny hand larz). The visitors may be described as having an inferior culture, or as being 'without cul ture'.

Religious Property12
The end of communism in Poland, in which many observers fe lt that the Roman Catholic Church had played a major part, inevitably brought major changes to that Church and, in the case ofPrzemysl, even more dramatic chang es to the Greek Catholics. The latter fo cused on the injustices of 1946-7, which could now for the first time be subjected to public criticism. It soon became clear that the most intractable issues were those concerning property. Greek Catholics looked for support fr om the Va tican, However, almost as soon as Greek Catholic aspirations were articulated a group of (lay) Roman Cathol ics formed an 'A:-;sociation fo r the Defence o f' the Carmelite Ch urch', which op posed the transfer on many grounds. They cou ld not deny that the b u i l din g had been used by th e Greek Catholics dow n to 1946, but in this case they argued that the usual postsoci alist logic, based on erasi ng the cvils ofsocialism, could not be fo llowed. They pointed out th at th is ch urch had been part of a Roman Catholic Carmeli te fo undation between its foundation in 1630 and its suppressi on by Empe ror Joseph II ofAustri a in 1781. . lt had been allocated to the Greek Catholics only in 1784, after they had refused the alternative ofl"er of the city's Jesuit church , located on a less imposing site lower down the same hill. Members of th e Defence Association argued that this act of violent appropriation was contrary to natural justice, and to specific laws enacted much later by the Polish Republic in 1928. They insisted it had never received any legal sanction. Th us th e Carmelites had been fully entitled to regain their former property in 1946 -all the more so as they had just them selves again been the victims of illegal appro priation, by the Soviet authorities in Lemberg.
The Association even traced descendants of the fo under's fa mily, who stated that it would be disrespectful to them ifthe church were to pass into other hands.
The Greek Catholics offered a quite different interpretation of the past, emphasizing the elements which suited their case. The building was said to incorporate materials fr om an even older Orthodox church, and in any case they had only abandoned their plans to erect a sep arate cathedral in the eighteenth century on a clear understanding, shared with Roman Cath olics at the time, that the transfer of the fo rmer Carmelite church was irrevocable. Some claimed that the building had in any case been legiti mately purchased fr om the Austrians, and that other members of the fo under's fa mily shared their view that it should be returned to them. They also claimed that their ownership had been confirmed in a 1925 Vatican Concordat, and was consistent with many other cases all over the world where a church fo unded by one rite of the Catholic church had passed into the hands of another. Finally, Ukrainian Greek Catholics emphasized that Roman Catholic Poles had not disputed its own ers h i p in the ge neration before i ts con fiscation in 1946, so that in cl"f' ect the latter were seeking to profit fro m socialist immorality.
Both sides could make a case in the real ms or h i stori cal discourse, but practical outcomes arc determined elsewhere. At first it seemed th at a com promise would prevail: the Papal Nu n ciatc J6: .wfKowalczyk, l'rimate J6zef G iemp and the Archbishop of Przemysl lgnacy Tokarczuk agreed at a m eeti ng in Wa rsaw that the build ing should be returned to the Greek Catholics ior five years, within which period they would set about the building of a new Cathedral chu rch . As soon as this decision became known the group oflay activists, with tacit and even some explicit support fr om junior local Roman Cath olic clergy, set about organizing protest cam paigns in the local media and then later on the streets. There were hunger strikes. Senior Ro man Catholic clergy were accused ofbeing KGB intelligence agents, others were condemned for refusing to hear the confessions of members of the protesting group. Some junior clergy sym pathised with the activists and helped to fr us trate attempts to mediate in the dispute. The protesters argued quite explicitly in the same 'us' versus 'them' terms that Solidarity had used so successfully over the years against the socialist authorities. They insisted that not only did they have a legally clear-cut case to retain the Carmelites' church, but that the city's Polish heritage was coming under a more general threat fr om returning Ukrainians. This issue of ecclesiastical property was central in fo menting a widespread climate of mistrust in the city at the very time the Pope himself was due to visit it in June 1991. Eventually John Paul II had little choice but to back down.
During his visit he gifted the building which the Greek Catholics had used unofficially for many years, the fo rmer Jesuit Church, which they had rejected in 1781, to be their Cathedral church in perpetuity.
Although there has also been some contro versy about other buildings, the Carmelite church has remained the principal symbolic fo cus for the minority issue. Having won the main battle in 1991, the nationalists made various alterations to the interior to highlight The Carmelite Church , formerly the Greek Catholic cathedral, with cupola (1996).
The Carmelite Church with its new spire (1997).
its Po lis h af'liliation. One wall wu:; covered with a large map of Poland s howing the pre-19:!9 boundaries and a p laque showing the Polish nationa l eagle with a :;wa:;tika in one daw and Ukraine's national sy mbol in the other. The fo llowing year the Carmelite clergy, s upported by th e nationalists , begun an attempt to tra ns fo rm the exterior ofthe church by removing th e tower and cupola th at had been added in the nineteenth century by the Greek Catholic:;. At first th e county Con:;ervation Ollicer gave hi:; permission and demolition commenced . He then changed his min d , only to be accu sed of pro Ukrain ian bias and in eJJect hounded out of office after the 1 994 local e lections by a coalition of national ists and ex-socialists. The issue sim mered while a successor was appointed. For several years the remnants of the cupola pro vided a visible reminder on the city skyline of the tradition that the Polish activists wished to obliterate.
The cupola was finally demolished in 1996, in circumstances which once again highlighted the tension between the local and national levels of political society. To the earlier his tori cal propositions a new one was added in media discussion: the claim that the canon law of the Carmelites prevented any building belonging to them fr om being adorned with any fo rm of tower or cupola. Hence the cupola would have to come down, irrespective of what the secular authorities might have to say. The National Conservation Officer insisted that state conser vation law overrode any such canon law. Va ri ous 'experts' declared that the cupola was struc turally unsound (no one took this argument very seriously) and that it did not harmonise architecturally with the rest of the building. No one asked the Ukrainians for their opinion.
As on the earlier occasion these various strands of discourse were eventually rendered brusquely irrelevant by practical action. The new County Conservation Officer was the ex socialist who had held the post before becoming a casualty of the political transformation of 1989-90. He still lacked qualifications, but the nationalists knew he would do their bidding. In scenes which read in media accounts like high fa rce, after ordering demolition to proceed he hid himself away fr om his office, so as not to be able to ta ke the counterma nding call which he knew w ould be made fr om the Ministry in Warsaw. The Carmelite clergy and demol ition worker:; :;ecd ed them:;elvo:; off from the world, as had tho occupiers of tho church in 1991 , in order to fr ustrate any last minute instructions to prevent the destruction ofthe cupola. Jn the fi>llow ing year, 1997, and apparently in disre ga rd of their own canon law, the Carmelites erected a slim new tower in place of the demol i:;hed cupola. Thwarted, tho National Conser vation Of'!icer in Wa n;aw contented himself with tho observation that the cupola, far fr om being Eastern Orthodox in character, had in fact been modelled on St. Peters in Rome. To a foreigner, th e onion shapes incorporated into the new tower have a more distinctive oriental character than the cupola it has replaced -but that is not how the skyli ne is perceived on the ground in Przemysl.
As for the perceptions of the minority, sever al of those interviewed said that they had wept when the cupola was dismantled. Most said that they had fe lt powerless to influence the course of events at any stage. Questioned about responsibility, some agreed with the interview er that only a tiny minority of the Polish popu lation was responsible. Others gave more thoughtful answers: some fe lt that the active minority was giving expression to prejudices that were deep and widespread throughout the Polish population. Although their Bishop has decided not to question the Pope's gift establish ing the fo rmer Jesuit church as their Cathedral on a permanent basis and major redecoration of this building was completed only recently, some Greek Catholics in Przemysl still do not fe el at home in this church. Confrontation is continu ing in 1998 over proposals to alter the Latin inscription on its fa cade, which are being op posed by Polish activists. Although this build ing was given to the Greek Catholics by the Pope himself, they believe that it is still viewed by many Poles as a Polish church. Some Greek Catholics therefore fav our a return to the plan of erecting their own new Cathedral, a building with an explicitly eastern design which would be undeniably 'ours '.13 Conclusions: Cul tural Differences, Past and Present In this fi nul section I d ru w out u f'ew themes of th is cuse study which muy huvc more general signi ficance.
First there is th e q u esti o n , sadly again a topicul on e in the Eastern E u rope ofthe 1990s, about the consequences of eth nic cleansing. From the point of view of Polish nationalists wishing to fi·ce their country of all 'foreign clements', the strategy or deportation and frag mentation implemented in 1947 must have seemed the optimal means to ensure the assim ilation of remaining Ukrainians into Polish soci ety. The actual consequences were rather diflerent. Hundreds of thousands of Ukraini ans have assimilated, but others have not and some have chosen to return to Przemysl. They have taken bitter memories back with them, and a determinati on to recreate and retain their different identity. It is conceivable that the goals ofPolish nati on ali sts might have been better served by leaving the Ukrainians in Przemysl alone; had they done so, more might have assimilated, and the creation of a willed community with an overwhelming sense of in justice might have been avoided.
Of course this argument can be turned around: perhaps Polish style ethnic cleansing was too soft, somehow not the real thing. Ye t the basic elements are not unlike some of the fo rced movements that have taken place more recent ly in fo rmer Yugoslavia, and there may be les sons to be learned here. One implication might be that, to realise the nationalists' programme, only the complete physical extermination of the threatening group is sufficient. Ye t here the Jewish case is instructive. Jews were subject to genocide rather than 'merely' ethnic cleansing.
Unlike Ukrainians, they have hardly been at presence at all in Przemysl for the last half century. Ye t anti-Semitism is alive and well, for as many observers have noted you don't need the physical presence of a Jewish minority for the old prejudice to retain at least some of its fo rce.
This raises more fu ndamental questions about nationalist agendas. The basic attitudes fo und in Przemysl are not peculiar to this city or 164 to Poland. Th ey arc fo und, i n somewhat dirtcr cn t fo rms, in most Eu ropean countries, whatev er the fo rmal details of citizenship legislation. H is true that there has been consideruble investment in recent years in many countries in transcending the principles of exclusion inher ent in nationalism by promoting instead the claims of a European identity. This is still v ig orously rejected by some, such as rightist poli ticians in Przemysl and in Britain, as an under mining of national sovereignty. C onti nued progress towards a 'united Europe' may only be possible if governments ride roughshod over the strongly held opinions of their citizens,just as liberal initiatives fr om Wars 1w in the 1990s have ridden roughshod over the views of local 'civil society' in Przemysl. But even if this progress is made, it seems to me that this merely reproduces the exclusiveness of nation states at a higher level. Przemysl will be a fr ontier city of the new Fortress Europe, but this role is unlikely to bring any improvement either in relationships with Ukraine or in the position of the Ukrainian minority inside their own city.
The final questions I wish to raise are ques tions about the appropriate units of analysis and the adequacy of key concepts in the disci pline of anthropology. First there is 'ethnic group' and various cognate terms. This has become extremely popular in most parts of the world in the last three decades or so. Even in African anthropology it is nowadays usual to talk about ethnic groups and ethnicity, rather than tribes and tribalism. Is this more than a mere cosmetic change, a matter of ephemeral political correctness? It seems to me that an thropologists are merely repeating the problem on another level when they go on to suggest replacing ethnic with national, on the grounds that nations and nation-ness are the most basic discursive fo rmations of the modern world ( usu ally of course claiming both a unique cultural identity and possession of a state).
The Polish case provides a good illustration of the semantic confusion which prevails in this field. Nar6d is usually translated as nation, while narodowosc is the term for nationality in the sense of ethnicity. Polish ethnographers have long used the concept ofgrupa etnograficz-na. Poland's post-co mmunist Constitution re fe rs in Arti<.:le :35 to prote<.: tion or the rights or 'national und ethnic minorities', without offe r ing any definitions. Polish sociul scientists huve assum ed !.hut nnlionnl minori.ly is intended to identify a peopl e who have their own sta te elsewh ere, s u ch a::; Ukrainian::;, while ethnic identifies ocatterod groups such as Roma, some regionally conce n trated people such as Kash ubs, and people whose language and religion link them to the Ukrain ians but who nonetheless reject that identi ty, p rere rring the d esignation Lemko. In pradice it seems that the Polish authorities in the 1990s have not been able to operational ise th is distinction between nati on al and eth n i c minorities. I p ropose that the terms ethnicity and ethnic group are the most acceptable designations for the sort of collective identity that has considerable importance for most people in the contemporary world -and, of course, fundamental importance fo r national ists. Most people, including virtually everyone in Przemysl, feel only one such identity; but in principle citizens should be allowed to declare more th an one, or none at all. In some cases the name of one's ethnic identity will be similar to or the same as the name of the state to which one belongs, and we must acknowledge ethnic majorities as well as ethnic minorities; the rights conferred by membership of a political community are entirely different fr om the iden tity one obtains through belonging to an ethnic community, be it majority or minority.
At the end of the day, what is this collective identity that has such experiential importance in our contemporary world? In this paper I have largely avoided the term culture, a concept which has become increasingly central to an thropology in the course of this century. I am by no means the first anthropologist to suggest that it is high time we questioned this central ity. Contemporary nationalist discourses in Przemysl are predicated on essentialist assump tions about unchanging identities. Ye t at the same time many Ukrainians share with Poles a tacit universalist definition of culture. They use this word to express the idea that western countries such as England and France are more advanced or 'civilised' than Russia and other countries ofEastern Europe. Poles and Ukrain-ian:; may oven agree that tho Poles arc, accord ing to this u n iver::;a list yardstick, a m o re cul tured nar6d than the Ukrainians. But both partie::; ulso a;;::;ert a particularist concept or cu l tureeach lays claim to a valuable national culture that is uniquely its own and historica l ly fixed in some essential way. In fa ct tho national cultures that contemporary nationalists assert and wish to protect are largely creations of the nineteenth century: yet it is in their name that communitie::; have been destroyed and driven apart communities in places like Przemysl. Jt is for the sake of maintaining a national culture that many people are now opposed to intermar riage, and even to participation in the religious fe stivals of the other group. Thus Ukrainian children at the newly established minority school in Przemysl learn about their national culture in standard literary Ukrainian; at their Dom Narodowy some of them practise national fo lk dances and learn to play the bandera, an instru ment previously unknown in the Przemysl re gion, but now considered part of their nation's heritage.
It is important not to exaggerate the change that has occurred. I do not wish to claim that no clearly defined boundaries of a kind commonly called cultural existed in Przemysl before the emergence of nationalist antagonisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Clearly there were such differences, and the most im portant were rooted in religion and expressed in different religious calendars and public rituals.
These differences did not prevent the develop ment of a high degree of 'inter-culturality': not only were the economic and social lives of Ro man Catholic and Greek Catholic villagers large ly identical, but the houses and churches they built, even the carols they sung at Christmas, were often a genuine synthesis of east and west in which it was impossible to say which element had chronological priority. 14 On the whole an east-west boundary was preserved, notably in the dialects people spoke (though as in most such contacts there was a great deal of borrow ing and mutual influence). But this was not a boundary imagined, as today's boundary is im agined, as a seal. It was a boundary that most people crossed constantly in their everyday lives, as they switched languages, visited their kin, and joined in the re ligious celebrat i o n s of the other group. Institute. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a Colloquium in the Wisscnsdw ftskollcg 7.U Hcrl in in l?cbrun ry 1 �198 and I thank my co-l?cllowH ii1r many h e l pful co mments . 2. The Church is also sometimes sti ll rcfcnwl to as the U n iatc C hurch, though not by its members, many of whom sec th is as a pejorative te rm. For m ore on the background and recent h istory of the Greek Catholics in this regio n sec Ke leher 1 993. 3. It is also the centre of a Roman Catholic Archdi ocese, and it contain s numerous rcligiouH orders of both sexes and both Catholic denomi nations, and one small Orthodox church. Unti l the 1940s there was al so a large Jewish population, of which almost n othing remai ns (though the present ci ty l i brary i s i mmediatel y rccogniHable as a fo rmer synagogue). In total, including sem inary students, about five hundred peop le out of a total city population ofjust under 70,000 make their living as bishops, priests, monks or nuns. Ta king into account other direct and indirect employment effects, the ecclesiastical sector is certainly one of the most important in the con temporary economy, as it was in the past. 4. For an exploration of Western epiphany tradi tions, and in particular of their political signifi cance in the legitimation of powerholdcrs, see Trexler 1997. 5. Sec Garnska-Lcmpicka 1969. The discussion in this section is taken largely fr om Hann 1998a, where fu rther references are supplied. 7. Personal communication, Dr. Anna Krochmal, county archivist in Przemysl. The boundary was commonly preserved within the mixed fa mily, children being brought up in the fa ith of the same-sex parent; it is difficult to conceive of such a practice today. 8. For comprehensive assessments of this action see Misito 1993, Mokry 1997. The action, widely commemorated by Ukrainians in 1997, has not been officially disavowed by any ofPoland's post socialist governments. 9. There was virtual unanimity on this last point in the interviews carried out by Dr. S�pien in 1996-7. See no. 1 above and S�pier1 and Hann 1998. 10. See Habermas 1992. I have discussed the con cept of civil society at greater length in Hann 1996. 11. Interview with Dariusz Iwaneczko, Public Rela tions officer, in the city council offices in January 1998. 12. Again, for fu rther detail and references concern ing this section see Hann 1998a. 13. For more detail concerning minority views see S�pien and Hann 1998. 14. For specific examples of such fu sions see Hann 1998b. 15. For a recent example see Geertz (1995: 43) who points acutely to some of the difficulties with the concept but recommends that we continue to use it reg-a rd lesH. 1\ similar lim• is !itllowed by the littJr:t ry s<.:holar Gt•o!'f'rcy llartrnan (1998). Per haps the best way liu·wa rd is that indicated by Eri<.: Wo l f, who shows in his In test hook pn•<.:isely how concret e re lnt ions of power nnd ideolol-(y cn n be integmt ed into invest. ig-nt ions ofcu lture (1998: 28!i-91).