Development of Neo-Unia in the Volynian Voivodeship in the 1920s–1930s (According to the Documents of the State Archives of Ternopil Region)

Neo-Union, as a project of the Catholic clergy to subjugate the Orthodox population of Poland to the Vatican, began to spread in Volyn in 1925. The Orthodox clergy of the Volyn Diocese attached great importance to the struggle against it. All anti-Union work was controlled by the Volyn Theological Consistory, which corresponded on this issue with the Metropolitan of Warsaw, parish clergy, representatives of parishioners, civil authorities, and lawyers. The purpose of the work is to analyze the source potential of the little-studied archival documents of the Volyn Spiritual Consistory fund regarding the development of Neo-Union in the Volyn Voivodeship during the interwar period, stored in the State Archives of Ternopil Region, and their actualization in the scientifi c and research environment. The research methodology is based on the principles of historicism, objectivity and critical analysis of the source material. Archival sources study made it possible due to the use of general scientifi c (analysis and synthesis, comparison, generalization, statistical) and special-historical (problematic-chronological, historical reconstruction, historical-typological, historical-genetic, biographical) methods. The scientifi c novelty of the research lies in the fact that for the fi rst time the analysis of the source potential of the Volyn Spiritual Consistory fond was conducted for the study of the historical development of the Neo-Union in Volyn in the 1920s and 1930s. The documents were grouped according to the topics, and the directions of the union rooting were revealed. The results of this study outline the prospects for further studies on the history of the neo-Union and Orthodox churches in the interwar period with the involvement of a layer of newly discovered archival materials. The analyzed documents allow us to conclude that the the Volyn Spiritual Consistory fond is valuable and important source for studying the problems related to the development of the Neo-Union in Volyn. At the same time, as documents of a religious nature, they require critical uderstanding.