Potelych Church of the Holy Ghost (Церква св. Духа; Tserkva sv. Dukha). A monument of 16th-century Ukrainian wooden architecture in Potelych (now in Zhovkva raion, Lviv oblast). A fairly typical Boiko church, it consists of three frames with a tiered pyramidal top (built in the 18th century) over the central frame. The interior walls of the nave and the southern wall of the vestibule were decorated with religious paintings done in the 1620s to 1640s by masters of a single school. The artists applied tempera directly to the walls and did not adhere closely to the traditional rules: they added a ‘national’ flavor to some of the scenes by replacing Saints Constantine and Helen with Prince Volodymyr the Great and Princess Olha, and depicting warriors as Cossacks and the Pharisees as Galician Jews of the period. The paintings are preserved in the National Museum in Lviv and have been described in monographs by Liudmyla Miliaieva (1969, 1971).

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