In the predawn darkness of August 4th, Viktoria Marynina and more than 100 other Ukrainians from the town of Ivano-Frankivsk gathered at the base of Krizevac in Medjugorje, preparing to pray for an end to the war in their country.
A group of Catholics, among whom there were several children, climbed for more than an hour along the stone path that millions of pilgrims have passed in order to reach the historical place under the cross exactly at sunrise.
Ukrainians are some of the many pilgrims who set out for the once-remote Bosnian town of Medjugorje this summer after Pope Francis officially authorized pilgrimages there.
Medjugorje’s journey from an unknown Yugoslav village where tobacco and wine were produced to one of the world’s largest Christian pilgrimage sites began in June 1981, when a group of children claimed to have seen several apparitions of the Virgin Mary on a rocky hillside above their village.
As Medjugorje began to change due to the increasing number of religious travelers coming from all over the world in the 2010s, the Vatican sent teams to investigate the reported apparitions.
Pope Francis initially dismissed the alleged apparitions of Mary, saying in 2017 that the claims were “not worth much”.
However, the pope softened his stance. In May 2019, he officially authorized Catholic organizations to organize pilgrimages in Medjugorje, saying that the said apparitions needed further investigation.
But just as Medjugorje was preparing for a large influx of Catholic pilgrims, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out.
Ivo, a waiter in the popular Pivnica Medjugorje, says that the pandemic hit the town particularly hard considering its almost complete dependence on tourism.
Mario Vasilj, the head of the Tourist Board of Medjugorje, said that it is difficult to know the exact number of tourists in that town because many people only stop for a short time on their way to somewhere else in the Balkans. But he says a youth festival this year attracted some 30.000 pilgrims, more people than the town, with its 20.000 beds, is capable of handling, Slobodna Evropa reports.
E.Dz.
