“People Said My Father Was Supposedly Polish, but It Made No Difference to Him”—A Vernacular Perspective on National and Religious Identifications in the Subcarpathian Countryside Before and After World War II

Abstract

In this article I analyse the period of social and political upheaval faced by mixed Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic families living in the Subcarpathian countryside in the 1930s and 1940s. Focusing on a vernacular perspective often overlooked in nation-centric historiographies, I describe the nature of neighbourly relations and collective identity both before and after World War II. I pay particular attention to the ambiguous connections between religious and ethnic identities before the war, highlighting phenomena such as bi-ritualism and diglossia. I then juxtapose this with the specific circumstances of 1944–1945, when villagers were frequently forced to choose their ethnic identity under the threat of Polish and Ukrainian nationalist guerrillas, especially active during that time. Building on a rich body of ethnographic material, I argue that choices of ethnic identity during a “state of exception” were often unstable and shaped primarily by the imperative of survival and other pragmatic considerations. However, I also present tragic stories of mixed families, where the ethnic choices made by some individuals were rooted in their deeply held convictions. Additionally, I reference scholars who are re-evaluating and complicating the relationship between nationalism and religious identity in rural European communities living in border areas, including Norman Davies, Kate Brown, Max Bergholz, and Jarosław Syrnyk.

1. Introduction

Violence in borderland societies is often retrospectively explained through the lens of ethnicity, as if national antagonisms were self-evident and historically inevitable. Micro-historical and ethnographic research has increasingly challenged such accounts, demonstrating that they tend to flatten the social dynamics of violence by obscuring the roles of contingency, fear, and locally specific configurations of power. Rather than arising from stable ethnic or religious divisions, violence in such contexts frequently unfolds through situational processes in which social boundaries are rapidly reconfigured.

A paradigmatic illustration of this process is provided by Max Bergholz’s micro-historical study of the Kulen Vakuf region in north-western Bosnia. Analysing the massacres that took place in 1941, immediately following the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), Bergholz shows that ethnic criteria alone are insufficient to account for the escalation of violence. Before 1941, Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim inhabitants of Kulen Vakuf were embedded in dense networks of neighbourly relations that structured everyday life. This social fabric was violently disrupted after the formation of the NDH. During the ensuing wave of mass executions, approximately 2000 Muslim residents of the town were killed. Subsequent investigations failed to identify clear perpetrators—neither Communist Partisans, Chetniks, Ustaše, nor foreign military units—and the victims themselves were absent from official registers of “fascist terror” (Bergholz 2016, pp. 3–4). Residents of Kulen Vakuf appeared both as victims and perpetrators. In the immediate aftermath of the NDH’s establishment, Orthodox Serbs became targets of Ustaše-affiliated units composed of Catholic and Muslim neighbours identifying as Croats; soon afterwards, these positions were reversed. This rapid shifting of roles underscores the temporal and situational character of violence, which cannot be adequately explained by reference to ethnic or religious antagonisms alone (Bergholz 2016, p. 4).

A similarly complex social mosaic characterised the region examined in this article. On the eve of World War II, the territories of today’s Jarosław and Przeworsk counties, then forming part of the Lwów district in south-eastern Poland, were inhabited by Poles, Ukrainians (Ruthenians), Jews, and Roma. In rural areas on the right bank of the San River, Greek Catholic affiliation predominated, the local dialect (a fusion of Ukrainian and Polish) was widely spoken, and mixed marriages—whether described as Polish–Ukrainian or, more aptly in many cases, as mixed by rite—were commonplace. Linguistic hybridity further reinforced this form of coexistence, as everyday speech itself blurred distinctions that would later be reinterpreted as markers of national difference. Until the mid-nineteenth century, these rural populations belonged to the landed estates of Polish magnate families such as the Czartoryski, Lubomirski, and Sapieha.

The shared conditions of peasant life, regardless of confessional affiliation, constituted an important factor of social integration. National differentiation, by contrast, was a relatively new phenomenon and far from universally intelligible; the political and intellectual impulses of the Spring of Nations remained largely confined to urban and elite milieus.

Until 1918, the region formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and during the First World War its inhabitants served in the same imperial army. The shifting fronts of the war brought destruction to local villages and religious buildings, while epidemics and food shortages compounded material hardship. Yet even into the 1930s, ethnic or national identity did not constitute an obvious or necessary framework of self-description among either Roman Catholic or Greek Catholic inhabitants of the San borderlands. For a long time, none of the groups present exercised political dominance at the vernacular level of their coexistence, and many families developed established, pragmatic ways of managing confessional difference within everyday life.

The sense of a lost social harmony emerged only when wartime and post-war transformations rendered nationality and religious affiliation primary axes of political and social division. While World War I marked a period of crisis for these communities, the far-reaching and definitive transformations of the borderland unfolded only after its conclusion. The years of war and occupation profoundly destabilised pre-war social structures, intensified material deprivation, and exposed local populations to competing and increasingly radical nationalist projects. At the same time, they did not entirely extinguish expectations that social life might eventually return to a relative normalcy. These hopes were shattered in the autumn of 1944. Violence perpetrated by armed partisan groups operating in the surrounding forests further eroded pre-war social ties and fractured the internal cohesion of local communities. This process was compounded by state policies aimed first at the systematic “de-Ukrainianization” of the region and later at its enforced Polonization, completing the dismantling of the former social world.

In line with Fredrik Barth’s insight, understanding such processes requires moving beyond taken-for-granted ethnic categories and instead examining the factors that, in specific historical situations, produce distinctions between members and non-members of a community on the basis of shifting and contingent criteria (Barth 1969). This article builds on this perspective by foregrounding religion not as a fixed marker of ethnic belonging, but as a lived, vernacular practice embedded in everyday strategies of survival.

Drawing on ethnographic interviews and historical sources from south-eastern Poland, the article examines how religious affiliation functioned as a situational and performative resource in contexts marked by fear, coercion, and fragmented political authority. It shows that when power is dispersed, and individuals’ lives depend on multiple, competing bearers of violence, navigating between religious traditions and identity repertoires often becomes a pragmatic necessity rather than an expression of stable belief or enduring loyalty.

The article contributes to broader debates on religion, mass violence, and cultural memory in twentieth-century borderland societies in three ways. First, it challenges approaches that treat religion primarily as a derivative expression of ethnic identity. Second, it offers a contextual analysis of how violence and fear function as social conditions through which religion is experienced, interpreted, and mobilised as a marker of belonging under circumstances of radical uncertainty. Third, the article intervenes in debates on nationalism and religious identity by demonstrating that, in vernacular rural borderland contexts, the alignment between religion and nation—well into the 1950s and prior to the growing influence of formal schooling—was neither natural nor inevitable, but emerged in response to specific constellations of particular configurations of violence, insecurity, and oppressive control.

1.1. Nation-Centred Narratives and Regimes of Recognition

In school history textbooks and dominant public discourses, historical processes are typically narrated through a nation-centred lens, with nations presented as the primary and autonomous agents of history. Within this framework, national histories are frequently structured around war and conflict, treated as pivotal moments in a linear and teleological national trajectory (Iriye 2004, p. 212). This long-standing rhetorical habit, both reflecting and shaping social imaginaries, cultivates the belief that the nation is ontologically real, experienced as a tangible and self-evident presence rather than as a contingent historical construct.

Within the discursive practices that shape national canons of culture and memory, the nation is commonly portrayed as an internally coherent and morally unified entity. Applied to historical pedagogy, such representations contribute to the naturalisation of the nation as a collective moral agent, while obscuring the asymmetries, exclusions, and internal conflicts embedded in its narrative foundations. National histories thus often function as censored accounts, delineating who may be recognised as legitimate historical subjects and whose lives, experiences, or deaths remain marginal or invisible.

This mechanism resonates with Judith Butler’s argument that institutional frames of recognition render certain lives more “grievable” than others, thereby shaping the very conditions under which political and moral perception operates (Butler 2009). As Billig (1995) observes, acts of violence are routinely rationalised as undertaken “for the nation”—whether in the name of defending territory, safeguarding identity, or securing an imagined historical continuity. Nationhood thus appears not merely as a descriptive category, but as an ethical horizon against which other lives, affiliations, and loyalties are measured.

Importantly, such frameworks operate not only at the level of cognition or ideology but also affectively. They shape collective emotions—fear, resentment, pride, and moral anxiety—which in turn influence how violence is interpreted, justified, or silenced.

1.2. Borderlands, Contingency, and Neighborliness

Within nation-centred narratives, the experiences of individuals and communities whose lives unfold at the margins of national belonging are frequently marginalised or erased. This applies particularly to borderland societies, where shifting state borders repeatedly disrupted political, cultural, and legal affiliations. Such historical instability fostered an acute awareness of the arbitrariness and contingency of the nation as a social construct.

Research on borderland communities demonstrates that the adoption of a given national identity often stemmed from pragmatic considerations rather than ideological commitment. Aligning oneself with a particular national group could offer temporary protection, access to resources, or a sense of security under rapidly changing political conditions. In other cases, national identification emerged from specific biographical experiences—for instance, a rupture with a group whose members had inflicted harm on oneself or one’s relatives, or a growing sense of affinity with another group whose cultural practices had become emotionally meaningful.

For many individuals, however, national identity remained peripheral or even irrelevant. Their sense of belonging was rooted instead in local social ties, shared practices, and attachment to a specific place. A sense of national belonging—or its absence—was thus shaped not only by processes of socialisation embedded within a given historical formation, but also by lived experience, which could confirm, transform, or undermine culturally internalised schemes of identification. Rather than functioning as a stable or self-evident attribute, national identification appears here as situational, contingent, and deeply responsive to biographical encounters with power, violence, and exclusion.

These observations complicate the formation of a collective “we” presumed by national narratives. As Herzfeld (2007, p. 91) and Wolff-Powęska (2011, p. 53) note, such narratives integrate selected events that inspire pride while simultaneously reinforcing distinctions between “insiders” and “outsiders.” Such a logic constrains ethical reflection on collective responsibility and systemic harm.

1.3. Memory, Ethics, and the Limits of Nation-Centred Epistemologies

Scholars of cultural memory have long observed that national memory tends to privilege episodes that reinforce a positive self-image and align with contemporary political objectives (Assmann 2013, p. 50). Cultural canons often function to valorise a nation’s achievements, while systematically marginalising or obscuring episodes of violence, complicity, or wrongdoing, thereby shaping collective memory and national self-understanding. Yet, as Aleida Assmann argues, an ethical engagement with the past requires not only remembering victims but also confronting the deeds of perpetrators within historical memory. Only memory practices that integrate both dimensions enable communities to address the full complexity of their histories (Assmann 2013, pp. 12, 52).

Georg Kreis similarly emphasises that revising biased or official memory narratives necessitates creating space for alternative, critical, and particular memories to be articulated (Kreis 2013, p. 181). Jerzy Jedlicki further warns that leaving participation in persecution and violence unacknowledged—without records, consequences, or the experience of shame—renders the “lightness of history” more haunting than its burden (Jedlicki 2013, p. 168).

Beyond ethical implications, however, nation-centred narratives also impose epistemological constraints. Essentialist and reductionist ethnic interpretations of the past have historically narrowed research questions and obscured forms of experience that do not conform to stable national categories (Syrnyk 2018, p. 18). They remain largely silent on the lives of individuals and communities whose identities were fluid, situational, or locally embedded, particularly in peripheral or borderland regions.

As Hastings and Wilson (2007, p. 21) note, border regions continually challenge political elites by revealing that territorial boundaries do not neatly coincide with the distribution of ethnic or national groups. In this sense, borderlands expose the empirical fragility of ethnohistorical historiographies and the limitations of treating nations as bounded, homogeneous entities. For this reason, Magdalena Zowczak argues that the metaphorical and polysemic category of the borderland remains analytically more productive for the study of contemporary culture than the once-dominant focus on “identity” (Zowczak 2015, pp. 20–21).

1.4. Toward Religion as Lived and Affective Practice

In contrast to the nation-centred narratives prevalent in educational and public discourse, many historians and social scientists have highlighted the historically contingent and socially constructed character of the nation, recognising it as an imagined entity that nonetheless exerts tangible effects on social and historical processes (Anderson 1983; Syrnyk 2018). As Tomasz Kosiek observes, ethnic identities rarely take homogeneous forms with clearly demarcated and consistently practiced boundaries (Kosiek 2020, p. 385).

These insights have informed the emergence of transnational and anthropologically oriented approaches to history, which foreground disruption, displacement, and the fragmentation of lived experience under conditions of migration, conflict, and political upheaval (Herzfeld 2004, p. 83). Although such perspectives have productively destabilised the nation as an analytical category, they have tended to pay limited attention to religion as a lived, affective, and situational practice in these contexts.

Nationalism has, of course, been analysed as a form of religion in its own right (Hayes 1926; Smith 2003; Brubaker 2012), and certain influential definitions of religion—most notably Clifford Geertz’s—could plausibly be applied to the nation as well (Geertz 1973). Both national and religious identities operate within social imaginaries, mobilise affect, and generate powerful forms of collective belonging. Yet historical experience demonstrates that they are not identical social phenomena, even if they frequently function in a symbiotic relationship. In this article, therefore, religion and nation are treated as analytically distinct, though mutually entangled, dimensions of social life.

Building on these perspectives, the article foregrounds religion not as a fixed marker of ethnic or national affiliation, but as a vernacular and relational resource through which individuals navigate uncertainty, fear, and shifting regimes of power. It juxtaposes two historically situated modes of enacting religious identity within the same local community. The first pertains to the interwar period, when religious affiliation was not automatically interpreted in national terms and often functioned as a primary framework of belonging. At that time, many families lived at the intersection of two rites—Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic—while simultaneously negotiating the influence of both church institutions. The second mode emerges during and after World War II, when experiences of extreme violence and political upheaval led to the growing conflation of religious and national identities, marginalising those whose sense of belonging did not conform to the newly imposed alignments.

When authority becomes dispersed, and everyday life depends on multiple, often competing, bearers of violence, individuals are frequently compelled to manoeuvre between different social affiliations, moral frameworks, and religious cultures. Under such conditions, religion may function as a performative and affective asset—one that enables recognition, survival, and orientation in situations marked by radical contingency. This theoretical framework provides the basis for a methodological approach attentive to lived religion, affect, and everyday strategies of negotiation in contexts shaped by violence and instability.

2. Material and Methods: Ethnographic Fieldwork

The historical context outlined above demonstrates that in borderland settings, religious affiliation, local social ties, and national categorizations were neither fixed nor self-evident, but situational and historically contingent. In everyday life, religious difference often functioned less as a marker of antagonism than as one of several overlapping frameworks through which social relations were organised. This fluidity—particularly visible in lived religious practices and family arrangements—is frequently obscured in macro-historical narratives centred on the nation and armed conflict.

To capture these processes, this study adopts a qualitative, ethnographically informed research design focused on individual life histories and local memories. The analysis presented here is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in south-eastern Poland, a region historically shaped by shifting political borders and religious pluralism. The study draws on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with residents of villages located in the former Polish–Ukrainian borderland.

The corpus of sources discussed in this article emerged from ethnographic research conducted between 2019 and 2021 in the Jarosław and Przeworsk counties, within the framework of what is referred to here as the ethnographic laboratory, under my supervision at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw. The project, entitled (Post)Memory of World War II and Its Aftermath in Subcarpathia: An Anthropological Inquiry, was situated at the intersection of several anthropological subdisciplines, including historical anthropology, memory studies, the anthropology of violence and warfare, and approaches associated with history “from below.” The analytical perspective was further informed by scholarship on ethnic and cultural borderlands, which provided an additional conceptual lens for interpreting the collected material. The research team included: Zuzanna Newbery, Paweł Godziuk, Zofia Brola, Zuzanna Deptuła, Piotr Przybysz, Iga Kondrciuk, Kalina Krzysztofik, Igor Fedorowicz, Mikołaj Witkowski, and Olga Załęska and Aleksandra Czub.

Source materials were collected in thirty-six settlements situated on both banks of the San River. On the left bank, called Zasanie, these included Przeworsk, Grzęska, Tryńcza, Wólka Ogryzkowa, Gorzyce, Wola Buchowska, Niechciałka, Wólka Pełkińska, Pełkinie, Ujezna, Kostków, Jarosław, Leżachów-Osada, Kruhel, and Białoboki. On the right bank, called Nadsanie, fieldwork was conducted in Cieplice, Rudka, Borki, Pigany, Sieniawa, Wylewa, Dobra, the Witoldówka Forest District, Czerce, Czerwona Wola, Leżachów, Manasterz, Nielepkowice, Wiązownica, Cetula, Surmaczówka, Zapałów, Radawa, Mołodycz, and neighbouring hamlets.

The data generated through this project opened up perspectives on the period that are largely absent from conventional historical narratives, revealing unsettling and often obscured dimensions of the past. They prompted an examination of how this historical moment appears when approached from the ground up. Granting interpretive space to a generation now in the twilight of their lives—those whose formative years unfolded during World War II and its immediate aftermath—responded to what Posern-Zieliński (1987, pp. 34–35) has termed an “urgent anthropology.”

The lived realities recalled by interlocutors rarely align with historiographical accounts that idealise national experience. Instead, they expose the heterogeneous and often contradictory character of local histories, which resist interpretative frameworks produced in metropolitan centres. Throughout the interviews, particular attention was paid to the categories through which interlocutors themselves made sense of wartime and post-war events, as well as to the emotional registers accompanying these recollections.

Preliminary findings from this research have been discussed in the edited volume Kruche życia… (Lubańska 2024b). However, the scope and richness of the collected material allow for the development of multiple further scholarly analyses. In total, the study draws on interviews with 122 interlocutors. The majority of participants (67 individuals) were born between 1919 and 1943. Among them, 18—twice as many women as men—were born between 1919 and 1929 and could recall events dating back to the 1930s. A further 28% of participants were born between 1944 and 1960, again with women more prominently represented. Only a small fraction (approximately 5%) were born after 1960. These younger family members were typically present in a supportive role, contributing contextual knowledge, clarifying details, or recalling narratives already familiar within the family.

The collected source materials primarily concern mixed families, comprising members of both Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic denominations, residing along the Polish–Ukrainian border in what are today the Jarosław and Przeworsk counties. The data derive from the memories of the oldest inhabitants of these areas, reaching back to the 1930s. Interviewees included individuals who avoided forced relocations between 1944 and 1947, as well as those who later returned to the region.

The analysis was grounded in an interpretive approach oriented toward lived religion, understood as embedded in everyday practices, family relations, and local moral worlds rather than formal institutional frameworks. Narratives were analysed with particular attention to how religious affiliation, national categorisation, and belonging were articulated in relation to concrete life experiences, affective responses, and historical disruptions.

At the outset, it is important to note that the micro-historical and ethnographically oriented methodology employed in this article does not aim to reconstruct a comprehensive or representative account of religious life in the Subcarpathian borderlands during and after World War II. Rather, it seeks to illuminate thoroughly specific contexts and circumstances in which religion functioned as a particularly salient resource for negotiating insecurity, oppression, and volatile structures of power, highlighting the experiences of communities politically overshadowed by centers of power and by official narratives written for a narrowly defined “we”.

An inherent challenge of such micro-level approaches lies in the risk of underrepresenting broader institutional or geopolitical factors. To address the potential shortcomings of qualitative research, we have relied on careful contextualization and critical dialogue with macro-historical studies. In addition, archival materials provide valuable reference points—often containing accounts of the same events described by our interlocutors, though collected in the postwar years. While these sources are also prone to distortions, partly due to the political circumstances under which they were obtained, they often allow for the reconstruction of the most probable version of events and help fill gaps in oral accounts. The methodological foundation, therefore, lies in the mutual verification of different sources and data obtained through various research methods.

3. Results and Discussion

The Dynamics of Religious Coexistence Before World War II

Borderlands are ambivalent spaces where diverse cultural influences interact and merge, and where alternative perspectives on reality coexist, occasionally coming into tension, often in relation to a socially “significant other” (Lubańska 2017, p. 21). As Rebecca Bryant emphasizes, living together in such spaces requires acknowledging boundaries while simultaneously recognizing their negotiable character, which allows communities to inhabit and share space collaboratively (Bryant 2016, p. 8). The experience of borderland inhabitants may thus be described as navigating complex cultural dilemmas, continually performing multiple identities, and repeatedly engaging with difference, in contexts where externally ascribed categories shape everyday life (Pasieka 2016, p. 136).

Hastings Donnan and Thomas Wilson argue that communities located on the peripheries of states, developing their own distinctive local cultures, are acutely aware of their difference from the core or majority population of the so-called “national community” (Hastings and Wilson 2007, p. 20). While borderland residents often develop effective strategies of peaceful coexistence between different ethnic and denominational groups during periods of political stability, they remain particularly vulnerable to persecution and violence when established power structures collapse or new authorities emerge. Borderlands are therefore highly sensitive to shifts in political and social conditions. Depending on historical circumstances, they may transform from spaces of coexistence into arenas of conflict and bloodshed. Reciprocity in intergroup relations in such regions is inherently ambivalent, maintained through practices of coexistence but liable to sudden collapse amid tension and enforced authority (Lubańska 2017, p. 30). Neighbours who once shared festive meals and visited one another may, under altered political conditions, turn weapons against each other. For this reason, borderland regions frequently become political “pressure points” for elites seeking to control or instrumentalise these culturally and socially fluid spaces (Lubańska 2024a, p. 19).

One of the key instruments through which states attempt to impose control over such populations is the census—an administrative apparatus designed to classify inhabitants according to categories of national belonging. Crucially, the conditions under which census data are collected rarely allow respondents to articulate their identities autonomously; rather, the situation itself is imbued with political expectations. People are often aware that their answers function as political declarations rather than neutral information, which in turn encourages strategic responses and self-censorship.

The first Galician census, which also included the area examined in this study, was conducted in 1857 and employed both religious and ethnic categories. At that time, these territories belonged to the Habsburg monarchy, which after the annexation of 1772 applied the name “Galicia” to lands formerly associated with the Principality of Halych-Volhynia and inhabited by Poles, Ruthenians, Germans (including Austrians), and Jews (Wolff 2020, p. 17). The census indicated that Poles and Ruthenians together constituted over 80 percent of the population, in roughly equal proportions, while Jews formed the third largest group numerically (Wolff 2020, pp. 19–21). At the same time, the relative political and cultural freedoms of the Habsburg Empire facilitated the emergence of modern national movements (Brola 2024, p. 105; Wojakowski 2002, p. 102; Litak 2014, p. 94). However, as Roman Szporluk notes, these reforms allowed the formation of a political community but did not transform the rural Greek Catholic population into Ukrainians (Szporluk 2003, pp. 103–5). According to him, “in the early nineteenth century, Rusyns in Galicia lacked a secular ideology and did not use their language in writing, education, or public affairs, all of which were dominated by Polish language and ideas”1 (Szporluk 2003, p. 103). The majority remained Greek Catholic and tied to imperial structures, with serfdom continuing to shape the everyday lives of most peasants (Szporluk 2003, pp. 103–5). Additional obstacles to the emergence of a Ukrainian national identity included divergences between Ukrainians in Russia and Galicia and the absence of a unified literary language. As noticed by Szporluk these transformations began after 1906, with a key moment being the publication of Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s Galicia and Ukraine (1905), in which he advocated the creation of a common literary language for all Ukrainians (Szporluk 2003, p. 105).

Following the restoration of Polish independence on 12 November 1918, western Galicia was incorporated into the Second Polish Republic within the Lviv Voivodeship, while the eastern part fell under the authority of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic. According to Norman Davies, the population of Galicia experienced a profound sense of dislocation, as they were forced to confront the sudden disappearance of the political and legal structures that had framed everyday life only weeks before (Davies 2023, p. 521). For some inhabitants, this moment brought joy; for others, profound anxiety. It is important to note that not everyone experienced a sense of security under the new authorities, particularly in the context of the ongoing Polish–Ukrainian war, soon followed by the Polish–Bolshevik conflict (1919–1921). This period was marked by widespread instability and uncertainty.

After these conflicts and the incorporation of additional territories into Poland, new censuses were conducted. Analyses of the 1921 and 1931 interwar censuses in Eastern Galicia indicate that a significant minority—approximately ten percent of respondents—declared national affiliations that contradicted the assumption of a direct correspondence between religion and nationality (Mędrzecki 2018). At the same time, the Polish state pursued cultural policies aimed at Polonization and favouring ethnic Poles (Davies 2023, p. 553).

It is noteworthy that Greek Catholicism emerged in this region as early as the seventeenth century, stemming from the Union of Brest 1596, when a segment of the Orthodox clergy recognized the authority of the Catholic pope and adopted Catholic doctrines, while simultaneously maintaining their distinct rite, liturgical practices, ecclesiastical hierarchy, and church calendar, as well as permitting clerical marriage. The region was also often characterized by the coexistence of two Christian rites, reflecting its complex religious landscape. Despite these political transformations, mixed marriages between Poles and Ukrainians (or Rusyns/Ruthenians2) remained common in this region, and flexible approaches to religious rites continued to prevail well into the 1930s. This persistence can be attributed, among other factors, to the limited influence of schooling—one of the key institutions for shaping national consciousness—on rural communities, where children often attended school irregularly due to household and agricultural obligations. The Church, by contrast, exercised a more direct influence on everyday life, although, as will be shown, this influence was far from uniform.

As Olga Linkiewicz notes, even during this period some members of the Greek Catholic Church identified as Polish, while some Roman Catholics declared themselves Rusyns. In many villages, national declarations were made casually, reflecting a broader ambivalence toward rigid national categorisation (Linkiewicz 2018, p. 30). Mędrzecki similarly argues that until at least 1939, local social bonds constituted the primary framework through which rural inhabitants of Eastern Galicia understood themselves. While people were aware of formal distinctions—who was Greek Catholic or Roman Catholic, who was considered Ruthenian or Polish—these categories were often subordinated to dense networks of kinship and neighbourly relations that structured everyday village life (Mędrzecki 2018, p. 182).

Even our interlocutors, born in the 1930s and 1940s, recalled similar patterns of social interaction from their childhood:

There were mixed marriages–loads of them! (…) My mother’s mother was Ukrainian, and her husband was Polish.

[M, b. 1935, Jarosław, interview 213]

The residents of Pełkinie during that whole period, from before the war up to ’44, were really close-knit. So there were, above all, lots of mixed marriages–Poles marrying Ukrainians, or the other way around. And there was this tradition that, say, in these mixed families, sons were usually baptized in the father’s church, while daughters, on the other hand… But there were also cases when, for example, due to bad weather, a harsh winter, even our Roman Catholic residents would be baptized in the Orthodox church, simply because it was closer.

[M., b. 1960, Pełkinie, interview 154]

Yes, because the population here is mixed, that’s no secret. There aren’t, you could say, one-hundred-percent Poles. Of course, things change over time, you know, people assimilate. They were baptized in churches–overall, the faith is the same, the same Christ.

[M., b. 1954, Manasterz, interview 57]

People would say it one way or another–my father was supposedly Polish, but for him it didn’t really make any difference.

[W, b. 1943, Leżachów, Interview 148]

Such statements recur across interviews and point to a shared religious pragmatics in which spatial proximity, physical effort, and everyday obligations outweighed confessional distinctions.

I don’t know. In our village we had no problems at all. Poles went to the Orthodox church and we went there too. (…) There were no enemies in the village. Maybe somewhere further away, but not in our village–everyone liked each other. On holidays and otherwise, people visited one another. If something happened to someone, the others would run to help. There was no ‘this is a Pole, that’s a Ukrainian.’ There was none of that. We were all together.

[W, b. 1926, Leżachów, interview 66]

These accounts suggest that the primary distinctions within the village were perceived primarily through the lens of cultural differences rather than ethnic ones, highlighting the ways in which social identity was negotiated through shared practices, traditions, and religious life.

Yes, yes! They came together. My mother said that on Ukrainian holidays they went to Ukrainians, and later on Polish ones. That’s how a sense of community formed.

[M., b. 1942, Manasterz, interview 73]

Rusyns lived here with us, and there was harmony–very good harmony. Poles and Rusyns lived very well together. They respected our Easter and Christmas, and they also came to our church. My father and mother went to the Orthodox church for Easter. On the first day, the second day, they invited each other. If someone had a wedding, everyone was invited. There was nothing between them here.

[M. b. 1938. Jarosław, interview 6]

Participation in two liturgical calendars was remembered not as contradictory but as a natural extension of kinship and neighbourly obligations:

The Christmas period lasted a whole month, really. There was the Polish holiday and then, a week later, the Ukrainian, the Rusyn one. People went to each other’s houses, sang carols, shared food. I remember my parents going carolling–from neighbour to neighbour, singing under the windows. I don’t know if I sang or not, but I went along. These holidays were really family-like. Sometimes there was a stubborn Pole–when Ukrainians came and knocked, he’d refuse. If they knocked on the window, that meant: get out, they don’t want us here. That was the signal.

[M., b. 1935, Jarosław, interview 21]

It is noteworthy that interlocutors often assigned different semantic meanings to the terms Rusyn and Ukrainian. The former tended to mark ritual and confessional difference rather than national belonging, reflecting a persistent memory of a time when such distinctions were not politically salient:

We never called Greek Catholics, Uniates, Ukrainians–we called them Rusyns. These people didn’t have Ukrainian national consciousness; they were simply Greek Catholics. The rite was in the Rusyn language, so they didn’t really have national ideas or nationalism. My grandfather used to say: ‘What kind of Ukrainians were they, if they didn’t even know Ukrainian?

[M, b. 1960, Pełkinie, interwiev 154]

The quoted passage points to the criteria of ethnicity as perceived by Roman Catholic neighbours as necessary for recognising someone as Ukrainian. However, as is well established, the decisive factor in this regard is an individual’s own national self-identification. Kate Brown observes that a defining feature of many borderland and socially marginal groups is their capacity to adapt to changing circumstances (Brown 2013, p. 76). Another characteristic is widespread social bilingualism or diglossia, in which two languages are used interchangeably depending on context (Straczuk 2006, p. 13). The ability to sense when and how to use each linguistic register was an important marker of local belonging, or swojskość (Linkiewicz 2018, p. 78). In interwar Eastern Galicia, inhabitants often referred to their everyday speech simply as everyday talk (gadanie) and spoke a “Halych” dialect that combined elements of Ruthenian (ruski) and Polish.

Some respondents continued to define themselves simply as “locals” (tutejsi), which constituted an alternative to ethnic identification (Engelking 2000; Kwaśniewski 2000, p. 25). According to Linkiewicz, national affiliation was not a primary determinant of peasant identity (Linkiewicz 2018, p. 30). Familiarity and strangeness did not have fixed boundaries but were graded and situational. The primary division often ran not between Roman Catholics and Greek Catholics, but between the peasant world and the landed elites (Linkiewicz 2018, p. 120). Brown argues that approaching borderlands “more as a place than as an abstraction such as the nation” allows us to see how national categories cut across territory and individual lives, complicating both (Brown 2013, p. 25). As Homi Bhabha rightly points out, experiencing life within the locality of a culture can take many different forms, which are not necessarily bound to national categories. (Bhabha 2010, p. 146). This is reflected in how residents themselves perceived the local community:

We didn’t have many Rusyns here, but they weren’t really Rusyns either–they didn’t even know who they were.

[W, b. 1933, Gorzyce, interview 153]

Rusyns lived here, yes, but not Ukrainians. I don’t call them Ukrainians. Ukrainians live in Ukraine. There were no Ukrainians here.

[W1, b. 1936, Jarosław, interview 10]

Importantly, these accounts should not be read as evidence of an idealised or conflict-free past, but rather as testimonies to a social order in which difference was largely neutralised through routine and proximity rather than explicit negotiation. Because Roman Catholic parishes were less densely distributed than Greek Catholic ones, many Roman Catholics attended services in Orthodox or Greek Catholic churches (Linkiewicz 2018, p. 38). At the same time, choosing to walk to a distant Roman Catholic church rather than attend a nearby Orthodox one was often interpreted as an expression of hostility toward Ukrainians (Brola 2024, p. 113).

The church was far away, so we treated the Orthodox church as our own. No one said this is a church, that is an Orthodox church. Everything was ours. God is the same everywhere.

[W, b. 1933, Gorzyce, interview 153]

If someone didn’t want to walk far, they went to the nearest place and prayed to God. That was what mattered.

[W, b. 1943, Leżachów, interview 169]

These practices show how religious rites were embedded in the material conditions of rural life, where distance, weather, and physical effort often shaped ritual decisions more decisively than confessional allegiance.

What emerges from these narratives is not an absence of religious awareness, but a form of practical religiosity in which theological distinctions were secondary to lived relations and situational needs. In mixed families, customary arrangements sanctioned by households and communities shaped religious practice: children might be baptised in different rites depending on gender, proximity, or circumstance—a pattern confirmed by archival records (Fenczak 1990, p. 74). The eminent Polish historian Włodzimierz Mędrzecki similarly argues that, until 1939, local ties were the primary reference point in shaping the identities of villagers in Eastern Galicia, with religious affiliations playing a secondary role relative to familial and neighbourly bonds that held the rural community together (Mędrzecki 2018, p. 152).

In summary, the pre-war communities cannot be understood as composed of two clearly defined ethnic or national groups. As Mikołaj Witkowski observes, assuming either the presence or absence of national consciousness in their case is misleading; their situation is better understood through the fluid and performative ways in which such awareness was experienced (Witkowski 2025, p. 7). Scholars also emphasise that cultural identity—defined as an individual’s alignment with the values and patterns of a particular community (Hnatiuk 2003, p. 36)—does not necessarily lead to national identity, although it often precedes it. In this context, religion and language served as the primary markers of belonging.

The following section turns to the wartime and post-war period, when these ordinary practices of coexistence—long sustained by habit, proximity, and shared rhythms of life—were gradually destabilised and ultimately transformed under conditions of violence, coercion, and political intervention. In this process, the cultural values of the community acquired political significance—sometimes affirmatively, but paradoxically not only—ultimately paving the way for the emergence of national identities.

4. Religious Affiliations Under the State of Exception

We all went to the same cemetery, yes. There wasn’t… There wasn’t any… I mean, people married and liked each other. Some celebrated Rusins’ [Ruthenian] holidays, others Polish ones. They invited Ruthenians to Polish holidays, and then those Ruthenians invited people to Ruthenian holidays… People liked each other very much. And then such hatred emerged! And suddenly they started killing one another!

[W, b. 1931, Nielepkowice, interview 163]

The quotation used as the motto of this chapter may be treated as a synecdoche of the postwar atmosphere in the Subcarpathian region. “Hatred emerged” when relations of power changed, forcing the local population to choose a specific national identity.

The outbreak of World War II disrupted the pattern of neighbourly coexistence, which had functioned for many years, replacing it with notions of “insiders” and “outsiders” imposed by the occupying powers. Between 1939 and 1941, the San River was established as the border between the General Government and the USSR, separating families from relatives and denying them access to fields and property on the far bank. On the Soviet side, all inhabitants living within 800 metres of the river were forced to leave their homes and resettle elsewhere. The river also became a route for the illegal smuggling of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, who not infrequently fell victim to dishonest smugglers.

Another important caesura in the memories of interlocutors was marked by the advance of the front lines on 22 June 1941, connected with Operation Barbarossa, whose aim was the destruction of the Red Army west of the Daugava and Dnieper rivers and the occupation of the Baltic states. The borders of the General Government were then shifted eastwards to include Eastern Galicia. Recalling this period, interlocutors spoke of the dramatic fate of Jews—shot, deported to death camps, murdered by various perpetrators of violence (including Poles and Ukrainians)—as well as of camps for Soviet prisoners of war, who were starved to death. Local narratives also devoted considerable attention to forced labour and compulsory requisitions.

Both German and Soviet occupiers leveraged Ukrainian grievances to prevent coordinated resistance between Poles and Ukrainians. The Germans, by privileging Ukrainians over Poles and promising the prospect of a free Ukraine, pursued a divide-and-rule strategy, while simultaneously expecting active participation from Ukrainian partisan formations in the invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941 (Motyka 2011, pp. 54–55, 61; Chwalba 2011, p. 94).

The interviewees, drawing on communicative memory, claimed that these developments altered the texture of neighbourly relations, introducing mistrust and ethnic divisions:

When the Germans came, they immediately set Poles and Ukrainians against each other. They separated them. Very few neighbours spoke normally anymore, like before; there was already a difference. For some, Ukraine was in their heads; for others, it was the forest–once someone got hold of a weapon, they went there, attacked, robbed. And that’s how it was. There was one group of Polish nationalists [Banderites sic4!] and another group of Ukrainian nationalists [Banderites].

(M., b. 1933, Manasterz, interview 50)

As many scholars have observed, neighbourliness in religiously, conditionally, or ethnically mixed communities is highly fragile and vulnerable to external political factors and national-level events (Roth 2006; Hayden and Timothy 2013; Lubańska 2015, p. 60). Moreover, as Zowczak notes, “the relationship between the cultural categories of centre and border is one of interdependence, and the alternation of their mutual attraction and repulsion depends on political and economic conjunctures” (Zowczak 2015, p. 30).

Our respondents often observed that choosing Ukrainian national identity during World War II was sometimes motivated by the desire to gain access to a socially, politically, and/or economically privileged group:

This all started, as my father said, when the Germans promised Ukrainians a state, their own homeland. And they went over to the German side and fought against the Poles. That’s where it all came from. Before the war, nothing like that existed–people lived together, married one another, and helped each other as neighbours. Poles went to the Greek Catholic church, because the Catholic church was in Wiązownica, so they came here; the priest taught religion and sometimes even celebrated services in the church.

[W, b. 1955 interview 167]

As had occurred earlier during population censuses, wartime criteria for determining national identity were once again based on church records. It was not everyday religious practice—which, as we know, was often fluid and inter-ritual—but a single religious act, namely the sacrament of baptism in a particular Roman Catholic or Greek Catholic parish, that proved decisive.

When the war came, they issued identity cards, Kenkarten. Ukrainians received a U card, Poles a P. And on what basis were they issued? Where someone was baptised – if they were baptised in the Greek Catholic church, they received a U card.

[M., b. 1955, Leżachów, interview 149]

Only during the war did some local Ukrainians learn that they “belonged to another nation” and were Ukrainians—an awareness actively fostered by some clergy:

It was only then that some Ukrainians here learned they were Ukrainians. The priest, a Ukrainian one, made them realise it. He spread hatred… Every sermon, every sermon here in the church was anti-Polish.

[M., b. c. 1960, Gorzyce, interview 155]

In response, parishioners—including Ukrainians—began to avoid the church and increasingly attended Roman Catholic services in neighbouring villages.

It also happened that the same individuals underwent multiple conversions within a relatively short period of time—whether to fight, to survive, or for opportunistic reasons. Sometimes such conversions occurred under dramatic circumstances, not necessarily at the initiative of the person concerned. Relatives seeking to rescue someone from danger would transfer their baptismal record to a parish of another rite and present the new document to the authorities, hoping it would change the attitude towards that person. As interlocutors reported, however, such decisions were risky. A baptismal certificate that once saved someone could later bring serious trouble. Such decisions depended on the then-existing configurations of power.

In many accounts, the years 1944–1947 were remembered as a continuation of the war—paradoxically more dangerous than the earlier period. Civilians were effectively tossed between competing parties in the conflict, losing their sense of which “we” to belong to, how to define it, and which group to identify with. Sometimes, ultimate sympathy was extended to whichever group had not inflicted harm—occasionally as a matter of pure chance. As interlocutors stressed, “one never knew whom to fear”.

News of the genocide committed by Ukrainian nationalists against civilian Poles in Volhynia in 1943–1944 further deteriorated mutual relations. This violence led to the deaths of approximately 33,000 Poles (Motyka 2011, p. 447). Refugees arriving in Poland from those areas were often filled with resentment toward the Ukrainian population, contributing to the growing mistrust of local Ukrainians in this region as well.

The conflict between the Polish underground and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) resulted in numerous retaliatory actions, in which Polish and Ukrainian civilians frequently lost their lives. At the same time, the UPA was perceived by some as a force that could protect them from forced deportations to the USSR, which began in 1944, as well as from Polish partisan attacks. Conversely, those fearing Ukrainian partisan violence hoped for protection from Polish underground units.

Interlocutors recounted that, at that time, the life or death of a family depended on recognising which partisan group knocked at their door. Within fractions of a second, one had to sense which language to speak and how to behave to be recognised as “one of us”. As they recalled, “it was impossible to know whom to fear”. This affective choice—driven by fear for one’s life—of language or rite was not an expression of authentic religious identity, but a strategy of survival. Those who knew prayers of both rites and possessed double linguistic competence treated this as a resource enabling survival, switching sides depending on circumstances. This was possible only because they had previously functioned between two mixed ritual communities (Kwaśniewski 2000, pp. 7, 14).

Ukrainian partisans and Polish ones; both came. When they got drunk, anyone could do anything. People fled their homes; if no one was there, they did whatever they wanted.

[W. b. 1937, Manasterz, interview 83]

My grandmother was Roman Catholic, and my grandfather–my father–was Greek Catholic. And it was then, when the Germans started retreating, that many bands emerged here. Bands pretending to be the Home Army (AK), but it wasn’t the AK at all. These were robber bands who simply looted and killed.

[W., b. 1931, Gorzyce, interview 118]

At the same time, the very individuals who carried out robberies and murders against Ukrainian inhabitants on the right bank of the river, invoking ethnic arguments, perpetrated similar crimes against Polish neighbours on the left bank (Witkowski 2025, p. 14).

After the war there were even more of those bands. They formed everywhere and had weapons. If you had a horse in the stable, you had to fasten it with some kind of clamp, screwed tight, because they stole horses at night. They came, stole horses, murdered–everything happened. That’s when the bands were most active.

[M., b. 1939, Gorzyce, interview 113]

Under such conditions, individual self-identification mattered less than the categories imposed by those who exercised violence—partisans, military units, or militia—each responsible for sorting people into “ours” and “others”, often under acute pressure. Compulsory recruitment into partisan groups was a common practice, with non-compliance frequently framed as treason and met with extreme violence. In this way, individuals otherwise indifferent to national categories were nonetheless compelled to align themselves. The comparable pressures governed the provision of assistance to partisans. Not everyone offered shelter or provisions voluntarily, yet refusal could entail severe repercussions, including loss of life.

In the spring and summer of 1945, most of the Roman Catholic population from the right bank of the San, fearing for their lives, moved to the left bank. This period also saw an intensification of raids from across the river, affecting Greek Catholic communities. At the same time, the summer of 1945 marked the peak of deportations to the USSR, affecting the majority of Ukrainian inhabitants of the trans-San villages. Operation “Vistula” carried out in spring 1947 was considerably smaller in scale (Witkowski 2025, p. 18).

In 1945, the Przemyśl Greek Catholic bishop, Jozafat Kocyłowski, was arrested, and the Przemyśl seminary was closed (Stępień 1998, p. 342). Finally, as a result of the Lviv Synod convened by Stalin on 9–10 March 1946, the Greek Catholic Church in the USSR was liquidated and incorporated into the Russian Orthodox Church. In Poland, it was formally placed under the care of the Holy See (Lubańska 2007, pp. 26–27). Many Greek Catholic priests in both the USSR and Poland faced persecution, and most Church property was nationalised. Communist authorities in Poland also pursued a policy of intrigue between Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic clergy, spreading claims that the Greek Catholic Church could operate freely in Poland if not for the Roman Catholic Church (Stępień 1998, p. 352). In 1947, the same authorities carried out Operation “Vistula”, aimed at deporting Ukrainian/Rusyn, Lemko, and mixed populations from the Lublin, Rzeszów, and Kraków regions to the so-called “Recovered Territories”—areas newly acquired by Poland after Germany’s defeat, comprising nearly one-third of postwar Polish territory. Approximately 150,000 people were deported.

The deportations of this period may be compared to the devastation experienced by the Crow Nation described by Lear (2006). After losing everything that constituted the foundation of their culture and way of life, they experienced a kind of “end of the world” and were forced to rebuild life according to new cultural coordinates (P. Nowak 2013, p. ix). Similarly, Greek Catholics had to lay the foundations of a new life in an alien and often hostile environment.

Deported families of our interlocutors were sent primarily to regions of Warmia and Masuria (Syrnyk 2020, p. 479). The decisive factor in deportation decisions was often the nationality assigned to individuals in documents produced by German occupiers (Załęska 2024). Yet even then, some priests issued Roman Catholic baptismal certificates, and some officials were willing to cooperate. In certain cases, deportations were halted due to the intervention of neighbours.

One family was, so to speak, withdrawn from deportation. It was the family of my godfather, whose father was a Rusin and whose sons were baptised in the Orthodox church. On top of that, my godfather had been a postman during the Second World War, so after the war, he was accused of collaboration with the Germans. The whole family was placed on the deportation list (…). They were already packed in Przeworsk, but respected villagers from Pełkinie went to the decision-makers and opposed it. Many of these people stayed because all their lives they felt Polish. They had no contacts with armed groups, no incidents against the good of our village or Poles.

[M., b. 1960, Pełkinie, interview 154]

There were also reverse situations: neighbourly denunciations, in which people cynically informed the authorities that a person or family had collaborated with the UPA in order to seize their property:

In some cases, deportation decisions were controversial. I suspect that material interests were also involved–farms and fields were taken, only movable property was allowed, and the real estate remained. Others came and in 1947 settlers and repatriates from the East arrived and took over these farms.

[M., b. 1960, Pełkinie, interview 154]

According to Olga Załęska, deportation scenarios and decisions regarding who left and who stayed were entangled in local dependencies, personal sympathies, and antipathies (Załęska 2024, p. 197). Many Ukrainian villages were burned (sometimes by the UPA itself, to prevent Polish resettlement), place names were changed, and surviving farms were often resettled by Poles from other regions. Most prewar churches were destroyed. Some were converted into Roman Catholic churches, and others, for example, in Zapałów, became Orthodox churches:

After that, we no longer went to the Greek Catholic church.

[W. b. 1926, Leżachów, interview 66]

At home, people kept their own customs, but publicly no one showed it much anymore… because everyone was afraid; those were such times.

[W., b. 1943; K., b. 1970, Leżachów, interview 169]

National culture is a discourse whose canon is disseminated through top-down socialisation and state backing (Gellner 1991, pp. 48–52, orig. 1983). As Harris Mylonas and Maria Tudor observe, “mass schooling can explain both the initial fluidity and the consequent fixity of national identities. National identity becomes fixed when mass schooling with national content is introduced to a largely illiterate population” (Mylonas and Tudor 2021, p. 116). Since children in Subcarpathian villages did not begin to attend school regularly until after the war, it is unsurprising that schooling became the primary means of Polonisation (Kosiek 2018, p. 55).

These factors contributed to the fact that individuals from Polish–Ukrainian families who remained in Subcarpathia often internalised Polish national identity. Although many interviewees were aware of their mixed origins, many concealed their Ukrainian component:

There’s nothing to boast about if someone has Ukrainian roots in Poland. I don’t know how it is elsewhere, but generally it’s not something to be proud of–though before the war it didn’t matter at all.

[M., b. 1950, Leżachów, interview 149]

After all those disturbances, there are more Poles (…). Now there are more Poles here. There are no Ukrainians here anymore, only… although Ukrainians now all speak Polish.

[W., b. 1936, Leżachów, interview 66]

Asked about her national identity, the same interlocutor replied:

Well, I am… let it be so–I am Polish now, but I used to be Ukrainian. (…) Now I am Polish, because how could it be otherwise? I married a Pole… but I come from a Ukrainian family–my father was Ukrainian.

[W., b. 1936, Leżachów, interview 66]

We are aware that people conceal the fact that everyone here is mixed, if I may use an ugly word. Everyone here has multi-ethnic roots.

[W., b. 1959, Leżachów, interview 58]

Those deported under Operation Vistula rebuilt their lives in the so-called Recovered Territories, in former German houses, in a different cultural environment. Although in theory their number was not to exceed 10 per cent of a locality’s population, this limit was often exceeded in practice. Sharing a community of fate with other deportees, they consolidated and formed a community based on national ties, reinforced by the distance maintained by other settlers. Greek Catholicism could initially be practised only in secrecy. After Stalin’s death it became possible to practise openly, though with significant restrictions. Formally, the Greek Catholic Church was reactivated only in 1989, when Pope John Paul II appointed Józef Martyniak as the first Greek Catholic bishop.

Until around 1956, many Greek Catholics attended Roman Catholic Masses, yet some recalled quietly reciting their own prayers in their own language. I encountered such accounts during earlier fieldwork conducted in the region in 2004–2005 (Lubańska 2007, p. 28). After 1956, Greek Catholic pastoral care gradually revived, and returns to family regions became possible, though few chose to return, as their homes were occupied and churches taken over by Orthodox or Roman Catholic congregations. Those who did return often encountered hostility.

Drawing on research conducted independently and at different times by Anna Kowalczyk and Olga Załęska, the anti-Ukrainian policies implemented by the People’s Republic of Poland produced effects opposite to those intended. By restricting the population’s ability to maintain its traditions as an ethnic minority, these measures contributed to the consolidation and development of a modern national consciousness. Whereas former residents of Subcarpathia had maintained more fluid or situational identities, those who were deported during Operation Vistula came to identify unequivocally and fundamentally as Ukrainians (Kowalczyk 2007, p. 138; Załęska 2024, p. 202).

The ethnographic material discussed here suggests that, in the Subcarpathian countryside, the alignment between religion and national identity was neither natural nor inevitable. Before the war, religious difference often coexisted with dense networks of kinship, neighbourhood, and everyday cooperation, and was not necessarily perceived as a decisive marker of collective belonging. It was only under conditions of escalating violence, fear, and coercive power that religion became increasingly entangled with national categorisation and political loyalty, narrowing the space for ambiguity and alternative forms of self-understanding.

In the contexts examined here, religious repertoires functioned as flexible and performative resources, mobilised in response to rapidly shifting configurations of power. Choices of rite, language, or religious visibility were rarely expressions of conviction; they were more often strategies of survival, recognition, and protection under conditions of radical uncertainty/constraint.

While the microhistorical and ethnographically informed perspective adopted here allows for a fine-grained analysis of lived religious practices under conditions of crisis, it necessarily remains partial and contextual, privileging moments of rupture and contingency over comprehensive, long-term structural explanations. Its strength, however, lies undeniably in its validity, providing greater access to the inner worlds of social actors and to the idiosyncratic, emic ways in which they process the socio-cultural reality surrounding them.

5. Conclusions

The analysis presented in this article has approached religion and national belonging not as stable or self-evident categories, but as practices and orientations that were shaped, negotiated, and reconfigured under specific historical conditions. By situating individual narratives within the broader context of war, occupation, and postwar transformation, it has sought to show how religious affiliation functioned as a lived and situational resource rather than a fixed expression of ideological commitment.

Drawing on ethnographic data, it has shown that before World War II, religious difference did not automatically translate into national distinction, nor did it function as a primary axis of social division in local communities. Instead, religious affiliation operated within dense networks of kinship, neighbourhood, and shared labour, allowing for flexible and overlapping forms of belonging, including mixed-rite family arrangements and shared festive practices.

The wartime and postwar periods profoundly altered these configurations. Violence, displacement, and the collapse of pre-war social frameworks did not simply reveal latent ethnic antagonisms, but actively produced new forms of categorisation and exclusion. In a climate of fear, coercion, and fragmented authority, religion increasingly became entangled with projects of national homogenisation, even though this alignment was neither immediate nor uncontested. The narratives analysed in this article suggest that processes of identification were often provisional and pragmatic, shaped by shifting constellations of power rather than by deeply internalised ideological commitments.

These findings contribute to broader debates on nationalism and religious identity by demonstrating that the alignment between religion and nation was neither natural nor inevitable, but historically produced under specific conditions of violence and state intervention. By foregrounding religion as a vernacular and performative resource, this study contributes to ongoing debates on nationalism and religious identity in borderland contexts. It challenges approaches that treat religion primarily as a derivative marker of ethnic belonging and instead highlights its role as a medium through which individuals navigate uncertainty and seek protection in situations marked by violence and instability. At the same time, the persistence of affective, situational, and conditional modes of self-identification highlights the limits of nationalising projects and the resilience of community-based value systems, which resist full capture by nation-centred narratives.

This study underscores the importance of micro-historical and ethnographically informed perspectives for understanding the social life of religion in times of crisis. It demonstrates that religion cannot be reduced to belief or institutional affiliation alone, but must be approached as an embodied and relational practice, deeply embedded in everyday strategies of survival and coexistence. Such an approach provides a more nuanced account of how violence reshapes, without fully determining, people’s sense of belonging and attachment to religion.

Finally, examining religion as a lived and affective practice shows how ordinary actors navigated pressures in ambivalent, situational, and sometimes internally contradictory ways. The data presented in this article reveal that religious agency in the communities under study rarely manifested as explicit innovation or doctrinal transformation; rather, it functioned through pragmatic reconfiguration of existing repertoires, selective participation, temporary shifts in ritual affiliation, or the discreet preservation of practices within the private sphere. By foregrounding vernacular perspectives and lived practice, this study extends debates on nation and religion, emphasizing the limits of explanations that prioritize abstract, epistemological assumptions over everyday experience. It draws attention to the importance of anxiety, contingency, and vernacular moral worlds for understanding how identities are formed. Instead of providing definitive answers, the material examined here underscores both the fragility and capacity for creative adaptation of (religious/ethnic/national) belonging, reminding us of the intricacy of historical experience and the multi-layered dimensions of the identities that people hold.