Polish footsteps in Vladikavkaz

Poles from all over the North Caucasus Federal District came to
participate in the requiem

Over three thousand Poles lived in the Terskaya region before the
revolution of 1917, and the Roman Catholic parish had a 4,600-strong
flock. Today there are only 200 people in the Polish community of
Vladikavkaz. They are trying to preserve their cultural nature and
language.

There used to be a Polish quarter in the old part of the city. The
church of St. Anthony of Padua was its center.

"It was the heart of Polish culture which was, unfortunately,
irretrievably lost," Veronica Zelenskaya, chairman of the Polish
National-Cultural Society of North Ossetia, said.

The church was built in 1868 because the parish could not hold all the
believers, yet Poles kept arriving. But this is all history. Under
Stalin's repressions the church's last abbot, Antoniy Chervinsky, was
shot, the church was razed to the ground and a secondary school was
built over it. Only a fragment of the church's gates remains.

In our times, the city's authorities decided to build a school again,
on the crossing of the streets of Gorky and Tamayev. While
constructing it, the workers found crypts with fragments of bodies and
informed Veronica Zelenskaya about the findings.

 "Together with 94-year old pani Stanislava Chebotarevich we went to
the place immediately," Veronica recalls. "I asked the Minister of
Nationalities of North Ossetia Taymuraz Kasayev and the head of a
search group 'Charon' Alan Tatarov for help. We discovered that the
remains belong to a woman and two men. The minister, the city's
authorities and the workers showed respect to our history and wanted
to pay the tribute to the memory of the deceased citizens".

Poles from all over the North Caucasus Federal District came to
participate in the funeral procession and the requiem. Members of the
republic and city authorities, creative community, national-cultural
societies of North Ossetia participated. The beneficiary of the
Catholic parish Yanush Blaut headed the procession.

Polish contribution to the establishment of Vladikavkaz has not been
fully revealed and estimated. Some remarkable names were preserved:
Ippolit Vrevskiy, Yulia Vrevskaya, Antioch Verbitskiy, Marushka Ruter...
They were inscribed in the chronicles of the city and are closely
connected with its history. The church cannot be rebuilt but there is
hope that a memorial tablet can perpetuate the memory of the past for
future generations about the grand Polish quarter in the Caucasus...

Veronica Zelenskaya took part in the memorial events at Katyn at the
beginning of April before the tragic plane crash happened.

"It was a shock for us," she said. "The terrible catastrophe took the
lives of two men we were cooperating with on diaspora issues - Matsey
Plazhinskiy, head of a civic organization for contacts with
compatriots in Russia, and Andjey Pshevoznik, secretary-general of the
Polish Council for Protection of the Memory of Victims of Fight and
Martyrdom".

Tamara Buntury, Vladikavkaz. Exclusively for VK