Cathedral of Saint Nicholas [Ukrainian]

Chicago's Ukrainian Catholic history begins on the city's near north side in the late 1890s, when immigrants from western and Carpathian Ukraine (then often called Rusyns or Ruthenians, a label tied to the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Ukraine) began settling in the area. On December 31, 1905, fifty-one of those immigrants gathered at 939 Robey Street (today's Damen Avenue) and formally established the parish of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, Ruthenian Catholic. The next year, in 1906, the founders purchased their first church — a former Danish Lutheran house of worship at Superior and Bishop Streets — for $8,000, and elected a twelve-member board of trustees chaired by the first pastor, Fr. Victor Kovaletsky, with Dr. Volodymyr Simenovych as secretary. Fearing absorption by Latin-rite or Irish Catholic bishops, the founders wrote into the parish charter that no property would ever be held under the jurisdiction of a bishop of a different rite — a clause that still defines the parish's fiercely Eastern-Catholic identity. Fr. Kovaletsky departed in spring 1907 and was succeeded that same year by Fr. Nicholas Strutynsky, a recent arrival from Ukraine, who would shepherd the parish until 1921. Under Strutynsky and his energetic wife, the small immigrant colony became an organized, prospering, and self-consciously Ukrainian community. By 1911 it was clear that the Superior Street church was too small; Dr. Simenovych urged parishioners to "move west where much land is still available" and to build their own "new Rus" in Chicago. Twenty lots on Rice Street between Oakley and Leavitt were bought for $12,000, and Bishop Soter Ortynsky, the first Eastern-Catholic bishop in America, blessed the cornerstone in 1913. Within two years a magnificent Byzantine-Slavonic church with thirteen domes (one for Christ and one for each of the Twelve Apostles) stood in the heart of what would become Ukrainian Village. The first Divine Liturgy was celebrated on Christmas Day, January 7, 1915. Even before that, the parish had begun a Ukrainian heritage school, Ridna Shkola, which by 1922 had four teachers and 300 pupils; a full-time elementary school was built in 1935 (some sources say 1936) and a second school building followed in 1955. The parish's famed Lysenko Chorus won first place in a multi-state choral contest sponsored by the Chicago Tribune in 1930, and in 1941 St. Nicholas hosted the Eucharistic Congress for Eastern Rites. On July 14, 1961 the Holy See established a Ukrainian Catholic eparchy with its seat in Chicago and elevated St. Nicholas from parish to cathedral; Msgr. Jaroslaw Gabro, a native son of the parish, became its first bishop. The cathedral's interior was comprehensively renovated from 1974 to 1977 by iconographer Boris Makarenko (with Zenon Mazurkevich credited on the eparchy's site for that work), whose team re-rendered the icons in mosaic and fresco patterned after the originals in Kyiv's Saint Sophia. The only icon left untouched in that campaign was the 1928 image of Christ with the Apostles and his Mother above the rear of the sanctuary. A schism followed the new bishop's mandate that all eparchial parishes adopt the Gregorian calendar; in 1974 a group that wanted to keep the Julian calendar left St. Nicholas and founded the still-extant Sts. Volodymyr and Olha Church at Oakley and Superior. Healing between the two communities began in the 1980s and was openly marked in 1988 when an ecumenical commemoration of the millennium of Christianity in Ukraine brought together Ukrainian Catholics, Orthodox, and Baptists from across Chicagoland. Bishop Gabro died in 1980 and was succeeded by Bishop Innocent Lotocky, OSBM (1980–1993), then Bishop Michael Wiwchar, CSsR (1993–2000), then Bishop Richard Stephen Seminack (2003–2016). Pope Francis appointed Bishop Venedykt (Valery) Aleksiychuk, MSU, as the fifth bishop of the eparchy on April 20, 2017. A fourth great wave of immigrants arrived after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, and a fifth followed Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, both finding a spiritual home at the cathedral. Parishioners marked the parish centennial with a year of celebrations from December 2005 through November 2006. Since 2019 the cathedral has been undergoing a major structural restoration of its domes, roof, and windows; in 2024 it received a $250,000 Chicago Adopt-A-Landmark grant toward restoring its southern rose window, and had by then raised more than $4 million of a $5.6 million campaign goal.