Qualla: Cathedral of the Transfiguration, Lublin

Cathedral of the Transfiguration, Lublin: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BogTar200917, CC BY-SA 4.0. Ruska Street in Lublin runs along the eastern edge of the old town. The name itself, Ruthenian Street, is a memory of who used to live here. For most of Lublin's history this Polish, Catholic city had an Orthodox minority, mostly Ruthenian and later Ukrainian, who worshipped at a church on this street. The current Cathedral of the Transfiguration, the brick building that has stood here since 1633, was dedicated by Petro Mohyla of Kyiv, one of the most consequential Orthodox theologians of the seventeenth century. Its history is the history of Polish-Orthodox relations across four centuries: contested ownership, forced conversions, ethnic cleansing in the 1940s, and a parish that very nearly disappeared.

Image: BogTar200917 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cathedral of the Transfiguration, Lublin: Ancient Foundations

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sp668DSC_0300.JPG: Wistula derivative work: Szater (talk), CC BY 3.0. Documentary evidence puts the first Orthodox church in Lublin no later than 1390, and possibly much earlier. A fourteenth-century chronicle attributed to Wincenty Kadlubek mentions Daniel of Galicia building both a castle and an Orthodox church here in the thirteenth century, tho...

Image: Sp668DSC_0300.JPG: Wistula derivative work: Szater (talk) | CC BY 3.0

Cathedral of the Transfiguration, Lublin: Petro Mohyla's Dedication

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BogTar200917, CC BY-SA 4.0. Petro Mohyla, the Metropolitan of Kyiv from 1633 to 1647, was traveling from Krakow back to Kyiv when he stopped in Lublin on March 15, 1633, and dedicated the new brick Church of the Transfiguration. Mohyla was a major figure: a Moldavian aristocrat by birth, founder of the Kyiv...

Image: BogTar200917 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cathedral of the Transfiguration, Lublin: Returned to Orthodoxy by Imperial Force

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Krzysztof Brewczak, CC BY-SA 3.0 pl. The Russian Empire, after acquiring this part of Poland in the partitions, abolished the Uniate Eparchy of Chelm in 1875 by tsarist decree and military pressure. Throughout the eparchy, Uniate parishes were forcibly converted to Russian Orthodoxy. The Lublin parish came back into...

Image: Krzysztof Brewczak | CC BY-SA 3.0 pl

Cathedral of the Transfiguration, Lublin: The Vanishing of a Community

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Loraine, CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1939 the parish had grown to about 850 members, including Ukrainian emigrants and former soldiers of the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic, and Russians who had stayed in Lublin after the First World War. The Second World War, and what followed it, almost ended the paris...

Image: Loraine | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cathedral of the Transfiguration, Lublin: The Cathedral Today

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BogTar200917, CC BY-SA 4.0. After the war the church reopened in October 1945 and was restored partly with funding from the Polish Ministry of Reconstruction and donations from the Bialystok diocese, where Polish Orthodoxy was strongest. In time, the Church of the Transfiguration was elevated to cathedral s...

Image: BogTar200917 | CC BY-SA 4.0