Melnyk, Mykhailo I.

Melnyk, Mykhailo I. [Мельник, Михайло; Mel'nyk, Myxajlo], b 21 October 1903 in Sukha Volia, Liubachiv county, Galicia, d 9 October 1955 in Kyiv. Church figure. After studying at the Peremyshl Greek Catholic Theological Seminary and obtaining his TH D at Innsbruck University, he was a professor of theology at the Peremyshl Seminary from 1932 and then vicar-general for Drohobych from 1944. One of the founders of the so-called ‘Sponsoring Group for the Re-Union of the Greek Catholic Church with the Russian Orthodox Church’, he was secretly ordained Orthodox bishop of Drohobych and Sambir by the Moscow patriarch Aleksei (Simansky) in February 1946. This sponsoring group later convened the Lviv Sobor of 1946, which disbanded the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church in Western Ukraine.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]