Solovii, Meletii

Solovii, Meletii or Solovey, Meletius [Соловій, Мелетій; Solovij, Meletij], b 29 April 1918 in Perevoloka, Buchach county, Galicia, d 27 December 1984 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Basilian priest, church historian, and journalist. He entered the Basilian monastic order in 1932 and was ordained in 1941. He studied theology in Olomouc, Czechoslovakia; at Vienna University (D TH, 1944); and at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome (D TH, 1950). In 1950 he emigrated to Canada, where he helped edit the Basilian journal Svitlo (1957–64) and other publications and worked as a parish priest. In 1968–71 he was a professor at the University of Ottawa. A specialist in liturgics, he wrote Bozhestvenna liturhiia (1964; English trans The Byzantine Divine Liturgy, 1972), Introduction to Eastern Liturgical Theology (1972), Meletii Smotryts’kyi iak pys’mennyk (Meletii Smotrytsky as a Writer, 2 vols, 1977–8), and numerous articles, and coauthored (with Atanasii Velyky) a biography of Yosafat Kuntsevych (1967).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]