WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Ukrainian-American woman learned through a series of coincidences that her relatives – a probably uniquely prolific father and son team of architects – designed and built some 360 Ukrainian churches in the 19th and 20th centuries.
She has started a foundation that is working to restore and preserve the churches, many of which have been battered by war, communist-era neglect and the elements.
Khristina Lew, said her great grandfather, Vasyl Nahirny, and his son, Evhen, were accomplished architects in the city of Lviv. The elder Nahirny began designing churches in the 1880s. He drew up plans for around 200 Ukrainian Greek Catholic churches, usually to be constructed of wood and stone.
His son joined the family business in 1906 and continued alone after his father died in 1921. Evhen is credited with designing and supervising the construction of around 190 churches until the outbreak of war in 1939.
Both men had successful businesses designing secular buildings ranging from private villas to public libraries. But they became known for their church designs which incorporated distinctly Ukrainian elements featuring domes, rotunda, bell towers, internal galleries and balconies and iconostasis.
Evhen’s designs, while retaining traditional Ukrainian elements, were also influenced by his study of styles from around the world and from different eras. He incorporated flourishes from ancient Greece and Egypt, the Renaissance and Baroque, and art nouveau trends influencing architects in the early 20th century.
His typical designs were for churches in villages or small towns to accommodate between 200-300 parishioners. The ground plan was cruciform, his favorite material was wood and parts of the roofing might be thatched. Designs for larger structures featured three or five domes but the smaller churches had one dome, capped by a crown and cross.
Both men also drew up plans to restore and add new spaces to old churches dating back to the 17th century.
Historical documents salvaged from a Soviet dumpster
On March 31, the Kyiv Post talked to Khristina Lew, whose last name is pronounced “Lev” and means lion in Ukrainian – appropriate as the animal is associated with the symbols of Lviv where her family hails from.
Lew had come to a fundraising event at the port city of Annapolis in the state of Maryland. The money collected goes to the Foundation to Preserve Ukraine’s Sacral Arts (FTPUSA), which she began in 2014, inspired by the work of the Nahirnys, but which aims to fund restoration of old places of worship throughout Ukraine regardless of who designed them.
Khristina Lew described the fate of her relative, the younger architect Evhen Nahirny, as the Nazis retreated from Lviv in 1944 and Soviet occupation returned to western Ukraine.
She said he and his wife did not flee to the West as did some of their other relatives but remained to live out their lives under communist rule, hoping to avoid the interest of the Soviet secret police who had executed or imprisoned so many of those, like the Nahirnys, involved in defending and promoting Ukrainian culture and nationhood.
Evhen Nahirny died in 1951, and after his widow died in the 1980s, Soviet authorities cleared out their apartment depositing hundreds of architectural drawings, notes, letters, photographs, books and other documents into a waste container in the street prior to hauling everything off to the city’s garbage dump.
And that, Khristina Lew told the Kyiv Post, is when the first of an extraordinary series of coincidences intervened to prevent the precious trove of documents from destruction and to spark a chain of events that would ensure the magnificent legacy of the father and son duo would receive attention in Ukraine and beyond.
The director of the Lviv Art Gallery, who was aware of the work of the Nahirnys, happened to be walking past their apartment building as the documents were being thrown out. He immediately recognized their value and had them sent to the gallery, where an archivist, Natalia Filevych, sorted through the documents.
As Filevych sifted, as time allowed, through the materials she realized the huge contribution to Ukrainian culture the two architects had made and determined to find out more about the family.
Some pre-war letters from America among the documents yielded clues and showed Evhen Nahirny’s sister was married in the U.S. to someone called Wasyl Lew [the same name as Vasyl but with a transliteration commonly used in the West].
A happy quirk of coincidence
But communication between Soviet Ukraine and the U.S. was difficult, and who that Lew was or how to trace him Filevych could not discover until another quirk of coincidence made possible when communism fell in 1991 and her country gained independence.
In 1995, Filevych was visited by one of her own relatives from the U.S. She told the woman about the Nahirny documents and inquired whether she had ever heard of a family in the U.S. called Lew. She was astonished when her relative said she was close friends with the Lew family.
Wasyl Lew, who married Evhen Nahirny’s sister, had lived to a fine old age in America. He had been an academic and well-respected figure in the diaspora who had co-authored the first modern Ukrainian-English and English-Ukrainian dictionaries.
But Professor Wasyl Lew had died. However, his son, also called Wasyl – Khristina’s father – was very much alive. Filevych contacted him and he in turn phoned Khristina, who, by yet another coincidence, happened to be working at the time as a journalist and photographer in Kyiv for diaspora newspaper “The Ukrainian Weekly.”
Khristina, who had previously barely heard about the Nahirnys, visited Lviv and was captivated by the work and history of her relatives. In 1997, she returned to Lviv accompanied by her father. He had been born in the city in 1944 and ended up in America after his parents fled before the approaching Soviet army.
Wasyl Lew, who had worked for NASA, the American space agency, and later set up America’s first Catholic Television station, helped identify some photos and documents that had remained a mystery to Filevych. The Lviv Art Gallery put together an exhibition about the two architects and Wasyl Lew enabled the publication of a book about the Nahirnys.
The energetic Filevych has herself devoted much effort to research and publicize information about the Nahirnys and their work. She has become a friend to Khristina Lew and close partner in the foundation’s work.
Their research showed that Vasyl Nahirny’s architectural achievements were an integral part of a life dedicated to the Ukrainian national revival which took root in the second half of the 19th century.
A life dedicated to Ukraine’s national revival
Vasyl Nahirny was born near Lviv in 1847, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and stood out as an exceptional student in school. His talent won him a scholarship to the Zurich Institute of Technology.
After completing his courses, he stayed on in Switzerland for a decade as a lecturer but also to study the efficient Swiss system of cooperatives so he could apply the methods to help people in his homeland.
In what is now western Ukraine, activist groups of students, intellectuals, and clergy were instilling a sense of pride and identity among the Ukrainian population. An important pillar of their efforts was to educate the people who were mainly smallholders and agricultural workers.
But another key element of the nationhood-building project was to provide the often debt-ridden or outright impoverished farmers with some financial security. This was done by banding the farmers together in cooperatives and credit unions, which became the precursors to political pressure groups.
Vasyl Nahirny applied what he learned in Switzerland to help organize successful cooperatives which gave dramatic impetus to the nation-building project. In his authoritative book “Ukraine – A History,” author Orest Subtelny calls Vasyl Nahirny “the pioneer of the west Ukrainian cooperative movement.”
Nahirny visited Kyiv, at that time in the Russian Empire, in the late 1870s where similar work to revive Ukrainian national identity was taking place.
In 1882, he returned to Lviv to start his architect’s business and swiftly acquired a reputation for his beautiful church designs. Throughout his life he continued his prominent role in the Ukrainian national revival.
Khristina, who lives with her husband and child in the state of New Jersey, had already become enchanted by the work of the Nahirnys but refocused her efforts after the death of her father in 2012, who was very active in the development of America’s Ukrainian diaspora and devoted much effort to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church there.
“The work I’m trying to do to restore churches and preserve the legacy of the Nahirnys is as much a tribute to them as to the memory of my father,” she said.
She had already begun visiting Ukraine to track down and photograph the churches in 2011.
“I have visited around 50 churches myself. Sometimes I found surviving church archives or yellowing, frail documents and plans hidden or forgotten in dusty attics, that provided information about other churches,” she said.
“Despite those documents salvaged in Lviv, we have never been able to assemble a full list of all the churches the Nahirny’s designed,” she explained. “Probably nobody has ever matched the number of churches the two worked on but I’m not sure we’ll ever know exactly how prolific they were.”
Often during her visits, she found destruction wrought by two world wars, neglect and wanton vandalism by communist authorities trying to eradicate Christianity and Ukrainian identity, and heavy tolls taken by time and weather, which had destroyed or brought close to ruin many of the churches.
Some churches had been subjected to slipshod, inadequate repairs using whatever materials were available. Beautiful log roofs and walls were replaced by ugly corrugated iron or plastic sidings, damp and mildew ravaged the icons and carved wooden interiors of churches, rotting wooden foundations crumbled threatening to undermine entire structures.
Lew has seen some of the ruined churches but has not been able to establish how many others had been destroyed.
She said. “Another problem is the redrawing of borders following the wars, meaning that some churches are now in Poland, Slovakia and Romania.”
Training to preserve history
Her photographs from those trips were combined with reproductions of original Nahirny architectural drawings and research material to produce two books whose publication was supported by the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the U.S.
All the country’s old churches are a vital part of Ukraine’s history said Lew and in fact the three churches the foundation has helped with restorations so far, all in Lviv Oblast, are not Nahirny designs.
One involved a 17th century church in Stariy Yar where the FTPUSA paid for rotting wooden sections of the church to be replaced by local craftspeople using traditional methods to replicate the spruce planks needed for the repair.
Developing the use of local craftspeople employing traditional skills is a direction the foundation may move in, according to Lew.
The foundation, she said, is still at an early stage and has only modest funds. Rather than spending all the funds on limited restoration projects, she thinks that a more efficient use of resources would be in educating people about the importance of preserving churches and to train groups – craftsmen, historians, architects and others to expertly carry out restoration work.
“That may turn out to be our niche, our most important mission,” she said.
Lew said the foundation is already working with two expert advisers in Ukraine but is searching for others to help create the reservoir of specialized know-how to enable Ukraine to protect its historical churches for future generations.
“Few countries have such beautiful churches as Ukraine. These churches have always been at the center of Ukrainian communities and their history, they have bound them together and helped them to overcome the horrors inflicted by those who wanted to destroy the very idea of Ukraine,” she said.
“I think it is our duty to preserve the monuments that history has passed down to us. You need to know your history if you want to build a sound future.”
