A FOLK TALES ABOUT HALYCH AND ITS SURROUNDINGS

Abstract

The material gathers folk legends and tales collected by the author from the elders of Halych and its surrounding areas. The author of these records, Father Omelian Levytskyi (1821–1891), was a Greek Catholic priest from the village of Maidan (now part of the Kalush district, Ivano-Frankivsk region). He documented these stories in the 1850s. They were first published in the newspaper of Lviv’s Moscophile movement, «Slovo», under the titles «Several Folk Tales about Halych» (1879) and «More about Halych and Its Surroundings» (1881), written in the so-called «yazychiie» language. These published records significantly supplement previously unknown facts about the history of sacred monuments in the ancient city on the Dniester River. The author also provides little-known surnames of Halych’s residents of that time. The proposed text, adapted to meet the requirements of modern Ukrainian orthography, allows for a deeper understanding of Halych’s historical heritage in the 19th century. For better readability, different parts of the text have been combined into a single narrative, and the historical figures’ names omitted by the author are provided in square brackets, along with comments from the editor of the material.