If we don’t protect the residence of the Wonderworker from the corporate raids of those, who are willing to get everything and do nothing, we may lose the unique tourist attraction of Hutsulshchyna National Park.
More than 15 years ago Hutsulshchyna National Park created a tourist and artistic complex St. Nicholas’s Estate on its territory. It quickly became one of the favorite places of Ukrainian children and became popular abroad. However, during this winter period, when the Wonderworker has to prepare for New Year and Christmas holidays, the park’s staff has to protect themselves from the attacks of the Pistyn Village Council, which believes that the project created by the park must belong to it. And recently, its representatives even seized St.Nicholas’s Estate, locking it with a padlock. The park workers say that such confrontation happens not for the first time. Therefore, DUMKA decided to find out what caused the misunderstandings this time and whether they will prevent our Wonderworker from fulfilling his primary duty to give children hope, that their most cherished wishes will come true.
Those people, who were in Ivano-Frankivsk, knowing that there is a St. Nicholas’s Estate, could not miss the opportunity to go there. As since 2002 there lives the Ukrainian Wonderworker, who always acts in the right way: he hides gifts under the pillows of good children, and for the naughty ones, he puts a stick. He’s asking what their behavior throughout the year was. The initiator of the creation of this tourist-artistic complex is Hutsulshchyna NP, which workers set up an estate on the territory of the Pistyn Village Council of the Kosiv area, which, according to the President’s decree, was granted for the continuing use of the park.
They ask Nicholas to bring peace and fathers back home alive…
I was lucky to get to the territory of the estate (however, it was summer) in the first years of its functioning. Though apart from a wooden house surrounded by magnificent Carpathian forests, that was set up on the valley of the Pistyn outskirts, there was nothing else – only a huge desire of people to turn it not only into the landmark of Hutsulshchyna but also into the landmark of entire Ukraine. Only wooden statues of fairy-tale heroes – from a hedgehog and a hare to mermaids and leshy (according to Slavic mythology, a forest spirit which regulates and assigns prey to hunters – translator’s note) welcomed the visitors.
Anyway, these winter days I would like to tell you more about the changes in the estate. Since 2003, there is the Wonderworker’s mail, to which children write from everywhere. Since then, every mythical character has received more than one hundred thousand letters, each of which, especially now, when there is a war on our land, is not just a wish to get a new gadget, doll or Lego, but to save their father from the enemy’s bullet or even, bring the peace back to Ukraine. That all the letters, albeit through the helpers, get the answers from our St. Nicholas, which he writes, depending on his mood, with inks of different colors: red, black, blue, purple or green.
But I have to write about the problems of the estate itself, which we can simply lose because of these quarrels. Although, it would be great if once around the Wonderworker’s estate a whole village appeared, such as the one that Santa Claus owns in Lapland. So I phone the park. “They want to seize the estate!” I hear on the other end of the line, and to get the details of the conflict, which happened not for the first time, I addressed to Yurii Stefurak, who is now performing duties of the head of the NP.
Village Council cancels Presidential decrees
“The Pistyn Village Council adopts decisions, that cancel the decrees of the President and the government’s decisions, and then with the help of corporate raids tries to seize the territory of the estate. What is that supposed to mean?!” The head of the park is getting mad. “The decision of the session of the village council appointed Ivan Hrodiuk on the position of the head of the recreation department in his communal forestry, instructing the department… to rebuild our estate, and also to get ready for the Christmas Toy festival. How can this happen when this project was originally founded and created by the park? So Hrodiuk first came to us with a requirement to get untrammeled access to all the buildings of the Estate… and said that further, we must discuss all our issues with him because otherwise, he would not let us go inside. And then they came and seized St. Nicholas’s estate – the building where he hosted guests.”
What is the explanation for such a behavior of the representatives of the Pistyn village council? Yurii Stefurak says that all the mess is around half a hectare of land, which this village council considers its own communal property. “There are several buildings on the estate’s territory, and the village council says, that since the land is in their communal property, then small architectural forms located on it are theirs, too,” acting head of the NP explains DUMKA. “Although the issue of the property of this land is a separate problem, since I do not quite understand how the territory of the nature reserve fund was found in the communal property of the Pistyn village council, why the Kosiv Regional State Administration and district council agreed on this land survey project, which included 605 hectares of lands of the nature reserve fund at village’s borders, etc. In our opinion, there are a number of violations of the current legislation, which the park will appeal in court”.
What is behind?
Environmentalists stand up for the park, for the landmark, where the nearly mythic creatures live. For example, an expert on environmental problems, Oleh Lystopad in the comment to DUMKA recalled, that creating the NP Hutsulshchyna, forest managers did not want to give forests to the Environmental Protection Agencies. “Then we had to take the middle path,” explains the ecologist. “Out of the 32000 hectares created by the NP, 7600 were provided for its permanent use, and 24600 were left without taking them from permanent users, in particular, the considerable territory of the Kuty state forestry establishment. On these lands, foresters still could do their usual work, but they had to coordinate their actions with scientists in order to minimize the damage to nature: to save the most valuable parts of the forest, trees with nests of rare birds, etc.
But in real life, everything turns out not like on paper. Foresters usually come for approvals for the logging after the trees have already been felled and taken away from the forest. And when the State security service of the park comes to check the logging, they are not let in”. The park, says an expert, had long been required to get all the relevant documents, namely, on the territory for the estate’s building. For the fulfillment of the governmental order of March 27, 2013, the NP Hutsulshchyna signed an agreement with the state-owned enterprise Karpatyheodezkartografiia, which developed a land management project that had undergone a mandatory initial examination in the state service of Ukraine for Geodesy, Cartography, and Cadastre, having received a positive conclusion. However, this work, which had to be done by the state registration of this land and making of the real borders, has not been completed yet precisely because of the opposition of the Pistyn Village Council, which gives rise to such actions, not for the first time.
“The NP Hutsulshchyna was created in May 2002 by a decree of the President, and in accordance with Article 53 of the Law “On the Nature Reserve Fund”, the lands on the territory of the NP were granted the status of the nature reserve fund of Ukraine,” the head of the Ecological Group Pechenegi Serhii Shaparenko explains DUMKA. “And Articles 4 and 7 of the same law say that the boundaries of territories and objects of the NRF in the real size are established in accordance with the law. Until this is done, they will be determined in accordance with the projects for the creation of territories and objects of the NRF”.
Nevertheless, by the order of Pistyn village head Taras Beisiuk, the Ivano-Frankivsk branch of the research institute for the design of cities Dipromisto in 2013 developed and affirmed the plan of the village of Pistyn, which unlawfully included 605 hectares of lands of the NRF, which was provided for the sustained use of NP Hutsulshchyna. The land conflict between the park and the Pistyn Village Council was the subject of a long-standing legal controversy, which is currently being considered by the Supreme Administrative Court of Ukraine. But at this time, the Pistyn Village Council is trying to suspend all economic activities of the park by its decisions.”
Dancing around the cash register
What happened these days? Yurii Stefurak explains, “On the morning of November 20 Taras Beisiuk, Ivan Hrodiuk and several other employees of the village council seized St. Nicholas’s Estate, started to boss around, taking inventory and transferring temporary establishments and property of the park to the books of the communal enterprise, as well as making real-size boundaries of the land. We called the police, but they promised to come back. Therefore, we have officially informed the police, the prosecutor’s office and the SBU in Kosiv area about the intentions of illegal seizure of buildings and territory of St. Nicholas Estate”.
However, “guests” came again to the territory of the estate on November 29, and as they say in the park, locked St. Nicholas’s Estate. “According to this fact of a corporate raid seizure of the estate by the Pistyn village chairman and other people, a criminal proceeding was opened the same day,” adds the acting head of the NP. Yurii Stefurak is convinced, that the actions of the leadership of the Pistyn Village Council are of self-interest. “They tell me: you earn money on that, put a cash register, we will take money, and your people will be able to work as they did before,” he complains. “And the money collected for the commercial services is not enough even for the salaries of people who work in the Estate…
No one denies that there are some commercial services. Up until now, the entrance ticket cost as much as 5 UAH, now it is 12. Moreover, children from the Kosiv area, as well as benefit holders and Christian camps of all regions don’t pay. And nobody takes a single penny during the festivals. The sum collected for the season is saved in the special fund and goes to the salaries of watchmen, heating, etc.
As they say in the park, the amount of money earned around the seasons is ridiculously small, and the realization of such a large-scale project needs more funding, and the community of a separate village will simply not be able to deal with it. You can check how much the Estate… earns on the website of the park. For example, a little more than 242 thousand hryvnias were received from recreational activity last year. During 9 months of this year – almost 62 thousand. And the salary of 8 employees, who work in the estate year-round, for only 9 months is more than 305 thousand hryvnias, and considering taxes it is more than 372 thousand hryvnias. More than 80 thousand hryvnias were spent this year for ongoing repairs and arrangement of the territory. And this is only materials, all the work there is done with their own hands, so it’s as clear as two and two make four.
In order to understand the other side of the conflict, we call the Pistyn village chairman. “There are no problems with the estate,” explains Taras Beisiuk in the commentary to DUMKA. “But over the past 10 years of the work of the park they didn’t even manage to build a toilet, they put that money in their pockets. Now the community is arranging the park with everything needed. We took the man who used to be the face of the estate, this is a very decent man. The village council wants to have a cash register there. And I want that children could enter there for free, and if you take money, then everything should be transparent, through the cash register. I was told by a person whom I trust, that last year 373 thousand hryvnias were spent for their own needs.
The territory, where the property is located (and the holy man had no estate, it’s a mansion!), according to the State Land Cadastre, is in the communal property of our community. The mansion is developing and will develop. Now we are thinking of a bus stop. The problem is created by the workers of the park themselves. They even went to Veliky Ustyug. What for? For the blessings of the Moscow Patriarchate? I do not know, I am standing apart from the politics. This is the first time in the history of Ukraine when the community has taken the land covered with forests as the communal property of the village on the ground that they began to condemn the land, to cut down the forest, and now we don’t allow anyone to fell forest. And the community today wants to save the woods. So that the children had a holiday and everyone received presents.”
“Presidential decree had good intentions to create the park”
I asked Mr. Beisiuk what to do with the President’s decree, which created the NP Hutsulshchyna because it provides a completely different algorithm for the actions on that land. “The President’s decree had good intention to create the park, but there is a second paragraph – to go to land users and to coordinate everything with them, that is with people,” he explains. And in the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of Ukraine they simply do not want to understand this, so we are now doing everything possible to prevent these lands from being frittered away.”
The village chairman believes, that the NP Hutsulshchyna, which is one of the founders of Estate…, actually uses the land and the forest of Pistyn village council illegally. According to the decree of the head of state from 2002, by which the parks were created, the leadership of the NP for several months had to prepare documents for the right to use the areas on the park’s territory. But this has not been done so far. “For 16 years, nobody came to the village council and said that he wants to coordinate boundaries with us,” Taras Beisiuk complains. But the experts state, that while there is no project for the organization of the park, its boundaries are determined by the project of the park’s creation. Therefore, when someone says that the park has no boundaries, he is cunning. According to the lawyers, it is possible to change the boundaries of the NP only by the President’s decree, as it is written in the Law on the Nature Reserve Fund. And it is unlikely that the presidential decree can be canceled by the decision of the village council. Environmentalists who are concerned with the fate of NP Hutsulshchyna and Estate… recall that in reality, the park has repeatedly attempted to clearly outline the boundaries, but every time there was a bureaucratic failure at the higher levels: whether the money was received in a timely manner, or the body that should have done this job was renamed, or there was something else that completely objectively prevented the logical end in the question of defining the boundaries of the estate.
“We have a cash register, and we work transparently”
There are plenty more problems than the cash register, is it really worth seizing buildings on St. Nicholas estate’s territory, with the risk of leaving children without traditional holidays? We call the clergyman of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Kyiv Patriarchate, Eparchy of Kolomyia, Vasyl Pavliuk, who works as the head of the recreational and educational department of the St. Nicholas’s Estate complex and now serves as the Wonderworker, and we find ourselves there at a time when a group of children came to visit Nicholas.
“So far this weekend, at least in the estate, it was calm,” the present Saint Nicholas tells DUMKA, immediately warning that he had little time to talk. “There is one room, where there is a padlock of Pistyn village council, and another padlock, of the NP, is sealed even with our seals. This is the building on the territory of the Estate…, which the Pistyn Village Council claims, that is, on the land on which this building stands. And the main premises, that is, the central Estate… building works hard, as usual, we meet groups according to the previous booking. Today, we are constantly on the phone: people book, ask whether nothing has changed.”
Realizing that the priest has no time and hurries to meet the children (says he saw them in the window), I could not miss the opportunity to ask about money and a cash register. “We have it, it is in this building where we work, at the address: Pistyn, Ukrainian Street, 1-B, and everyone knows about it,” says Vasyl Pavliuk. It’s registered with the NP, and all the funds that we get for excursions by educational paths, for the workshops, gift products, are accounted transparently, nobody takes a penny in his pocket. Now according to the order of NP and in accordance with the legislative documents 9 points of paid services were approved. Two of them are gifts. We sell those that the park has purchased after all the requirements of tender procedures.”
Saint Nicholas still managed to tell that over the past season his estate was visited by almost 17 thousand guests. As for the trip to Veliky Ustyug, where Ded Moroz’s Estate is located, the Wonderworker finally added, this was at the beginning of the project when Myroslav Sokoliuk was still playing the role of our Nicholas. Then the former head of the NP Hutsulshchyna Vasyl Prorochuk, his scientific deputy assistant Yurii Stefurak, who is currently the head of the park, together with the deacon of the UOC-KP Ivan Blyzniuk from Kosiv and the head of the Kosiv children’s activity center Myroslav Sokoliuk presented this project on International Forum of New Year-Christmas characters, which took place in Veliky Ustyug, Vologda region of the Russian Federation.
We cannot coup with the problem without the intervention of law enforcement agencies
“It’s hot in here as if it’s not winter now,” Mr. Stefurak tries to joke. “We call for the advice of the lawyers of the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of Ukraine and the region because this disgrace must be put to an end. Our premises, which Pistyn Village Council really likes, were sealed in the presence of representatives of the Tuzly Lagoons National Nature Park, which in that exact time arrived here on a business trip. But law enforcement agencies must be involved in the solution of the problem, because it is a crime, and if they simply observe the events, such corporate raids will spread. Because now when the police come, they just watch. As there are no fights, there is no crime”.
Understanding that the tension is very high, the profile ministry joined to the resolution of the problem – in order to find out the details of the scandal, deputy minister of ecology and natural resources Vasyl Poluiko went to the site, initiating a meeting with regional and district heads, as well as with the law-enforcers. According to him, children must have a holiday, and all conflicts and issues must be resolved in the legal field without violating the law. “We agreed with the regional, area authorities and law enforcement agencies to join efforts to ensure the rule of law and to make everything to carry out the annual Christmas toy festival and Christmas and New Year holidays,” the Deputy Minister said. “Also we made an action plan for the full settlement of the conflict around the Estate…
It seems that it is enough, but the misunderstanding between the park and the Pistyn Village Council is just one aspect of the huge problem, which is based on land property and, of course, on the money. Independent experts say that the park is currently doing everything right and everything that it can: records violations, calls the police, files lawsuits, informs the public about the situation, and the answer to the question “What to do?” is known – to ensure that the police, prosecutors, and others authorities work. “It is important for the workers of the park that they are supported,” says Iryna Vyhrystiuk, the head of the Tuzly Lagoons National Nature Park, who just returned from the park Hutsulshchyna and knows the situation from the inside. This is not a local conflict, but, unfortunately, the problem of almost all objects of the nature reserve fund. And here it is necessary to analyze what should be done immediately to stop this barbaric process when the state lands are taken through the courts. To begin with, simply bringing at least one case to a logical end – at least to the court, and there are enough grounds for criminal proceedings.”
That is, why don’t the National Police, representatives of which are every time called by the workers of the park from Kosiv, investigate at least those violations of the law, that are visible to the naked eye since the officials of the Pistyn Village Council interfere the activities of the park regularly enough? Why doesn’t the General Prosecutor’s Office monitor the police’s investigation of all violations around the NP, providing proper legal support to this process? In the end, the solution to this problem is a test on how European we are, because to proclaim the vector of European development is not enough – we should show the ability to deal with the issues in the European way, resolving conflicts in the legal field, not by means of a brutal force.
By Larysa Vyshenska
