[2] The fact that life was thriving in the mountains long before the appearance of Poles here was confirmed by the Carpathian Architectural-Archaeological Expedition of the Institute of Social Sciences of the NAS of Ukraine, led by M. Rozhak in 1978-1988.

However: In the oldest of the issued descriptions - the lustration of 1564 (M. Hrushevsky, Sources for the History of Ukraine-Rus I, p. 231), Mshanets already appears as an old settlement of the Vlach law, on 20 ancient lans, to which later three more were added, besides the yards of the Schultheiß and the church.

Unlike the rest of Galicia, there were few Poles here, and the local minor nobility barely experienced colonization influences,[4] and the absolute majority of the inhabitants spoke the Boyko dialect of the Ukrainian language and belonged to the Greek Catholic Church.

Around 1900, mass emigration to the United States, Canada, and later France began, mainly due to the educational activities of Father Mykhailo Zubrytsky, who conducted lectures for peasants on the geography, economics, and other countries, and acquired a globe for the Prosvita reading room he founded.

Alongside studying various aspects of the daily life, spiritual, and material culture of the Boykos, he tirelessly and purposefully worked to improve the political, legal, economic, and educational-cultural status of the peasants.

His years of colossal work followed a well-known scenario in historiography: establishing a school with Ukrainian-language instruction and a "Prosvita" reading room, organizing a cooperative, adeptly combating alcoholism as a phenomenon and taverns, and more.

He consistently defended the peasants from the arbitrariness of both major and minor bureaucrats, explaining current legislation to them, writing appeals, requests, and protests, thereby helping many highlanders avoid unjust punishment or material harm.

On February 28, 1892, the "Prosvita" reading room was solemnly opened in Mshanets, initially located free of charge in the "izba" (shop) of Omelyan Demyanovsky, a neighbor of Father Mykhailo.

As of April 1, 1894: In 1904, the first comprehensive scientific expedition of Ukrainian ethnographers began in Mshanets, led by Dr. Ivan Franko, Professor Fedor Vovk from Paris, and Zenon Kuzel, a student at the University of Vienna.

In the spring of 1913, Mykhailo Zubrytskyi purchased 78 items in the Boykivshchyna region—tools for processing flax, hemp, and weaving canvas—and donated them to the Shevchenko Scientific Society Museum in Lviv ("Chronicle of NTSh" part 55).

The villages themselves (mostly women, children, and elderly people) after the terrible battles on Magura Limnianska found themselves under Russian occupation, with Don Cossacks and units of the renowned 'Wild Division' of Caucasian mountaineers stationed in them for almost half a year.

In the Polish-Ukrainian War for Galicia (1918-1919), the surrounding villages were generally passive, except for Mshanets, which again provided volunteers for the national cause.The Polish rule somewhat accelerated economic modernization (especially the development of the oil industry), although it did not bring about fundamental changes in life and everyday existence.

The influence of the OUN penetrated primarily through the youth: activists were the sons of appointed priests from surrounding villages or local boys who studied in gymnasiums and other educational institutions in Galicia.

Local communists became heads of village councils and kolkhozes, under the supervision of numerous incoming party cadres - military personnel, security officials, teachers, and others, mainly from Central and Eastern Ukraine, which were part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic at that time.

Levko Parashchak, a native of Mshanets and a survivor of Bolshevik concentration camps, preserved the memories of Ivan Maksymovych (Dniprenko) from Halivka about the "Red Broom" operation and the events of late autumn 1944.

In early 2018 a UGCC priest from Mshanets Roman Hrom brought a collective appeal of the initiative group signed by local residents to Kiev to the majority MP, while simultaneously leaving complaints on the regional and government hotlines.

But in these villages, these restrictions were not felt in any way, de facto "quarantine" here lasted for several decades: when it rained, they swam on the road, and in sunny weather, they suffocated from dust, the ability to move was very, very limited.

[136][137][138][139][140] In May 2024, the village parish community won the “Enhancing the Capacity of Private Farmers” competition and purchased a new agricultural tractor, which provides plowing, cultivating, mowing, raking, planting, and potato digging at social rates, and will later be used to clear snow from roads.

[153][154][155][156] On July 4, 2022, at the initiative of the wife of a local priest ("jimost"), teenagers participating in the rehabilitation camp filmed an educational eco-clip titled "Clean Up the Carpathians as You Would Your Own Backyard," dedicated to the memory of the late environmental activist and Ukrainian scout, Roman Zhuk.

[164][165][166][167] At the end of 2024, the story of the "Vertep Mobile" took an unexpected turn: one of the young men who had participated in the nativity play and caroling to fund it, upon reaching adulthood, signed a contract with the Armed Forces of Ukraine and was granted the right to use the "vertep-mobile" for military service.

[197][198][199] On April 26, 2024, the deputies of the Strilky village council appealed to the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Ruslan Stefanchuk, the Prime Minister of the Cabinet of Ministers Denys Shmyhal, the head of the Lviv Oblast State Administration Maksym Kozytskyi, and the Deputy Chairman of the Lviv Oblast Council Yurii Kholod with a call to cancel these changes in the territories bordering the European Union, as they are harmful to the development of these areas, unjustified, and violate at least 9 articles of the Constitution of Ukraine.

Father Mykhailo Zubrytskyi provides data that the Romani people did not participate in parish life and became notorious among peasants for their laziness - they refused to plant gardens and preferred to beg in other places.

However, as Professor Yaroslav Taras points out, the fact that "the first mention of the village of Mshanets [...] dates back to 1446, the presence of an ancient Rus' hillfort from the 11th-13th centuries on Mount Magura-Limnyanska, the existence of the nearby Peremyshl-Sambir diocese, and the location in the area of a large number of monasteries [...] allows us to once again affirm that this example was a relic representative of sacred construction from princely times, which continued to be produced in the 16th-18th centuries by monasteries strictly adhering to canonical sacred construction."

"Some guesses about the tradition of four-pitched roofs may bring to mind the cross churches from Slobozhanshchyna, which not only have the characteristic features of richer halls in the "Boiko style" but also have pitches with irregular octagonal shapes, which are more like squares with trimmed corners."

It can be argued that by 1905/6 certain funds were already accumulated "in a savings account at the post office" because at that time, after 20 years of pastoral work, Father Mykhailo began searching for an architect to develop a project for a masonry church.

[212] On December 18, 1907, just before Saint Nicholas Day, the project for the masonry church and bell tower was created free of charge by the renowned Lviv architect Ivan Dolynskyi, who at the time was designing residential buildings in the modern style.

The Mshanets icon features two unique moments that represent iconographic innovations by Ukrainian masters: the death of the righteous (on the right side of Christ's judgment, beneath the tiers of Paradise, lies a man on a bed under a red cover, next to him stands a tall, thin death figure with many faces on its body, holding spears, a scythe, and axes) and the woman-innkeeper ("korchmar") (the only clothed figure among the naked sinners; later, this motif will be further developed and will occupy a separate place in the iconography of hell motifs).

During the period of Independence, in 1996, Maria Fedorivna Vovkanich (Zamishchak) commissioned a unique statue of the Sorrowful Mother of God under the Cross from the renowned Lviv sculptor Mykola Posikira and financed its creation.

Engaging in a debate with the opinions of A. Vesselovsky regarding certain motifs of the carol, I. Franko presents his own observations in "Kievskaya Starina"[218] and in the German-language article "How Slavic Mythology Was Created," published in the Vienna journal "Archiv fur Slavische Philologie" (1907, vol.

In particular, in "Kievskaya Starina," he mentions a probable literary source for the motif presented in lines 30-45 - the miraculous defeat of the Polish army, which is a unique feature of the Mshanets carol, as it is not found in others.