Terelia, Yosyp or Terelya, Josyp [Тереля, Йосип; Terelja, Josyp], b 27 October 1943 in Kelechyn, Transcarpathia, d 16 March 2009 in Toronto. Dissident, political prisoner, mystic, and religious activist. Raised largely by his pious maternal grandmother, he became involved in the underground Ukrainian Catholic church at a young age. He was first sentenced to four years in Uzhhorod prison in 1962. For repeated escapes or attempts at escape, in 1963, 1965, 1967, and 1969, he was sentenced to additional terms of five, seven, eight, and three years, respectively, in labor camps in the Mordovian Autonomous Republic, and in the Vladimir prison near Moscow. He was ‘diagnosed’ as mentally ill in 1972 and incarcerated in psychiatric prisons (see Psychiatric hospitals, special) in Berehove, Sichevka, Cheliabinsk, Vinnytsia, and Dnipropetrovsk. In the GULAG concentration camps and prisons he was brutally abused. At the same time, Terelia experienced a number of mystical visions while incarcerated, most notably an apparition of the Virgin Mary in 1972 in the Vladimir prison. In 1976 he wrote an open letter protesting his and other inmates’ treatment to the KGB chief, Yurii Andropov, which was published as Notes from a Madhouse (1977) in the United States.

After being released in 1980, he returned to Transcarpathia and became active in the clandestine Ukrainian Catholic church. In September 1982 he founded and headed the Initiative Group in the Defense of the Rights of the Faithful and the Church in Ukraine, for which he was sentenced to a year in prison. In 1984 he renounced his Soviet citizenship and began publishing Khronika Katolyts'koï tserkvy na Ukraïni. He was rearrested in February 1985, and sentenced in August to seven years in labor camps in Perm oblast and five years’ exile. In the spring of 1987, however, he was released, and in September of that year allowed to emigrate to Canada with his family.

In the West Terelia published the journal Khrest. In addition, he was active on the Marian speaking circuit, although some doubted the veracity of his mystical visions and others were perturbed by the zeal of his spiritual convictions. Among his writings from this period are Josyp Terelya: Witness to Apparations and Persecutions in the USSR: An Autobiography (1991, with Michael H. Brown), Chorne i bile (Black and White, 1993, based on his prison diary from 1970 to 1975 and supplemented with his paintings and poems), and In the Kingdom of the Spirit (1995, trans Roman Danylak), which provides Terelia’s views on the contemporary issues facing Christians.

Osyp Zinkevych

[This article was updated in 2009.]