A Press Under Basilian Hands for a Century

The Pochaiv Monastery in Volhynia is not a simple story. For nearly a century, from 1720 to 1831, it was held by the Basilian Order, the monastic order that carried the Union of Brest's Greek Catholic identity forward, and its printing press operated throughout that period as what one scholarly source calls plainly the Uniate Catholic press in Pochaiv. That press produced over a hundred books across the eighteenth century, and in 1790 to 1791 it printed the Bohohlasnyk, a collection of roughly 247 Ukrainian religious songs.

That timing matters more than it might first appear. Pochaiv's printing press had a life before 1720 and another after 1831, when the monastery returned to Orthodox hands, and a work associated with the site at the wrong moment in that longer history can carry an ambiguous denominational identity, exactly the kind of trap that has made other Pochaiv era objects hard to attribute with confidence. The Bohohlasnyk carries no such ambiguity. It was compiled, printed and first circulated squarely inside the Basilian, Greek Catholic century, by the press the Basilians themselves ran, which is what makes it a genuinely verifiable piece of Ukrainian Greek Catholic publishing rather than a later, borrowed attachment to it.