Maria Melnyk

Maria Melnyk died in Stryi on 22 October 2026, in the hundredth year of her life; she was 99. No cause of death was given. Her granddaughter, Halyna Kravtsova, announced her death, and it was reported the same day by Suspilne Lviv, TSN Lviv, the Stryi broadcaster NTA and the Lviv Portal.

Her funeral was to begin on 23 October 2026 at 11:00 at her home, followed by a service at the chapel of the Hieromartyr Josaphat Kuntsevych on Drohobytska Street in Stryi.

Maria Melnyk, born Maria Surmyk, was born in 1927 in the village of Kolodnytsia, in the Stryi area of what is now Lviv Oblast, western Ukraine. Her father, Fedir (Teodor) Surmyk, was a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Her mother is not named in published reports. In 1944 her father left with the leadership of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and disappeared; the family believed he died in Transcarpathia.

In 1943, aged about 16, she joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and became a courier, or zviazkova, for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army under the code name Fialka (Violet). Her tasks included collecting money for food and clothing for the insurgents, delivering messages to other villages, and helping to nurse and transport wounded fighters, some of whom hid in a bunker on her family's property.

She was arrested on 9 February 1946. On 27 June 1946 a military tribunal convicted her under article 54 of the criminal code of the Ukrainian SSR, the Soviet Ukrainian counterpart of the treason article and sentenced her to 10 years of imprisonment followed by five years of exile. She was held in the Narva camp in Estonia and then in the settlement of Kengir in Kazakhstan, where prisoners were used on construction work. In 1954 she took part in the Kengir uprising, a prisoner revolt that lasted for weeks before it was crushed by Soviet troops.

She was released from the camp on 17 June 1955 and sent into exile in Omsk Oblast, Russia, where she worked in timber rafting. On 16 April 1957 the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR ordered her release from the special settlement, and she returned to Ukraine.

When she came home she learned that her family's house had been torn down. She settled in Stryi, married Mykhailo Melnyk and raised two children with him. She had three grandchildren and several great-grandchildren. On 14 November 2023 she gave a filmed oral history interview about the Ukrainian liberation movement and her deportation, now held in the archive of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance.

Maria Melnyk was among the last surviving couriers of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and a witness to the Kengir uprising. Her recorded testimony preserves a first hand account of the underground in the Stryi region, of the Soviet camps and of the exile that followed, and her granddaughter remembered her for her love of life, her faith in people and her commitment to helping others.