Carmelite Church, Przemyśl

The Austrian authorities also blocked the ongoing construction of a Greek Catholic Cathedral (an already erected belfry was later turned into a clock tower) and instead offered the town's Ukrainian population the confiscated Carmelite Church as part of a plan to solidify their rule over the newly acquired territory by setting its inhabitants against each other.

[1] Soon after the Second World War a Soviet controlled communist government expelled most of the Ukrainians from Przemyśl[3] during the Operation Vistula, including most of the clergy and bishop Josaphat Kotsylovsky (Jozefat Kocyłowski), who was martyred.

In 1946 Carmelite friars, who were forced to leave their monasteries in Soviet Ukraine, settled in Przemyśl [1] and returned to the empty church.

[1] Pope John Paul II wished to return the church to the Ukrainian Catholics who had used it prior to their expulsion by the Soviets.

The Carmelites begun modification of architectural details of the Cathedral to give it more of a Latin-rite appearance and erase traces of the church's links to Ukrainian Greek Catholicism.