One spring morning in 1987, 12-year-old Maria Kyzyn, from the village of Hrushiv in west Ukraine, declared that she had received a vision of the Madonna and Child. The apparition, she said, hovered above the dome of the local wooden church of the Holy Trinity, once attended by members of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, or Ukrainian Catholics, until closed by the Soviets in the late Forties. Groups of local men and women began to gather in the churchyard. Many of them claimed to have witnessed the apparition. Pilgrims descended on Hrushiv from distant parts of Ukraine and beyond. But despite the expanding perestroika of the era, the Soviet authorities barred access to the site.