Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Parish (Rokytne)

The first chapel of the Roman Catholic parish in Rokytne was built in 1774 by Józef Karwicki, owner of the town’s estate. He later began building a wooden St Joseph’s Church on the same site, but it burned down before construction was finished. Sunday and feast-day services were therefore moved to a wooden cemetery chapel built in 1818 by Jan Borkowski, hetman of Vasylkiv County in Kyiv Governorate. After purchasing the estate from him, the new owner, Franciszek Ksawery Branicki, built a wooden Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It housed the venerated image of Our Lady of Rokytne, modelled on the Roman image of Our Lady of the Snows. As the church could no longer accommodate the faithful and devotion to Our Lady of Rokytne grew, work began in 1904 on a new neo-Gothic masonry church. On Christmas Eve 1907, the old wooden church burned down. At the last moment, Fr Petro Trotskyi carried the Blessed Sacrament out of the burning building, while the parishioner Vitkovskyi saved the image of Our Lady of Rokytne. On 15 August 1908, the new masonry church was solemnly opened, and the renowned grace-bearing image was brought inside. Today, this church no longer exists in Rokytne. During the anti-religious campaign of the 1930s, it was destroyed, and its bricks were used to build a sports school. Only the outline of its foundations remains. The former priest’s house now houses the Rokytne District military commissariat. The former Catholic cemetery is now a public park, where only four gravestones survive. A Place of Remembrance and Prayer has been created beside them, and Rokytne’s residents come there to pray.