LVIV, Ukraine - The noise is deafening and the dust obscures the view as stonemasons, carpenters and craftsmen swarm around the cathedral that is the seat of Ukraine's Catholics and the centrepoint of a papal visit.
Pope John Paul's trip here this month -- the first by a pontiff to Ukraine -- will be a chance to lay to rest decades of Soviet repression, but is also fraught with the risk of ripping open wounds between the country's Orthodox and Catholic faiths.
Here in Lviv, the Catholic and nationalist heartland of western Ukraine, the mood is of frantic preparation. The Pope's face beams down from billboards and street traders are doing a brisk trade in papal postcards.
But in the more Russified capital Kiev, where the Pope will start his five-day visit on June 23, it is at best viewed with detached interest, and at worst with outright hostility. Hundreds of Orthodox nuns and priests have staged protests against the visit.
While Soviet rule tolerated the Russian Orthodox Church, which blossomed after the fall of Communism, other faiths struggled. Ukraine's main Catholic Church, called the Greek-Catholic Church, was banned in 1948.
Its churches, including St George's cathedral in Lviv which is now being renovated, were turned over to Orthodox parishes and its believers were either driven underground, into exile outside the Soviet Union, or carted off to Siberia.
PERSECUTION
"People have gone through a very difficult period and they have come out of this persecution bruised, wounded," said Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, the head of the Greek-Catholic Church.
"I somehow hope that the words of the Holy Father will be words that will heal and will help these people on the road of rebirth," he told Reuters.
The highlight for many Ukrainian Catholics will be the Pope's beatification of 27 Soviet-era martyrs. It is the first beatification in Ukraine -- the penultimate step towards being proclaimed a saint -- for the Greek-Catholics since 1867.
Those to be beatified include Yakym Senkivsky, a priest who the Church says was boiled to death in a cauldron after being arrested by Communist authorities in 1941 in western Ukraine.
Another priest, Emilian Kovch, died in a death camp at Majdanek in Poland in 1944 after the Nazi secret police arrested him for aiding Jews. Others died in Soviet workcamps in Siberia, or as the result of maltreatment in prison.
"In a way I hope it may draw a line under the past in a formal way," Husar said.
However in a country in which millions died during both World War Two and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's purges, Husar says the Church is conscious its martyrs must represent "a huge number of all sorts of people... who have died innocently."
Such gestures towards other faiths have however done little to allay Orthodox fears that the Vatican sees Ukraine as a land ripe for conversion. There are around six million Catholics in Ukraine and in excess of 10 million Orthodox believers.
The Orthodox Churches are based in Kiev, seen as the font of Russian Orthodoxy because it was there in 988 that Prince Volodymyr accepted Christianity.
Less than a century later, in 1054, Christianity split into a Western branch in Rome, which became the Roman Catholic Church, and an eastern one in Constantinople, now Istanbul, which became the Orthodox Church.
In a mark of the tensions the visit rouses among the Orthodox, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate -- which is subordinate to Russia's Orthodox Church -- sent the Pope a letter in January demanding he cancel his visit in June.
"CATHOLIC WAR"
Patriarch Alexiy II, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, this month accused Catholics of belligerence in Ukraine.
A papal visit to Russia would be impossible, he said, while "the Greek-Catholic war continues against Orthodox believers in Ukraine and until the Vatican stops its expansion into Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine."
Father Ken Nowakowski, spokesman for the Ukrainian Catholic Churches, said Orthodox fears about the Pope were misplaced.
"This is not a man who's coming with an army and is going to force mass conversions on the Orthodox -- he's coming to visit his faithful," he said.
Husar and Nowakowski said they expected the Pope to be conciliatory, echoing an apology to Orthodox believers in Greece in May when he asked for forgiveness for 1,000 years of sins committed by Roman Catholics against Orthodox Christians.
But the situation is more confused in Ukraine, where the Orthodox Church is itself divided.
The Moscow Patriarchate's letter to the Pope threatened to cut off all relations if the Pope met the leader of the rival Ukrainian Orthodox Church Kiev Patriarchate, Filaret, whom it described as "the pseudo-patriarch."
Such a meeting appears possible although it is likely to occur during a gathering of all Ukraine's religious groups rather a private audience -- a formula the Vatican hopes will stave off a further deterioration in relations.
Husar said Orthodox protests had perhaps been excessive.
"But we ought to understand that the Pope is not simply meeting Patriarch Filaret or (Moscow Patriarchate leader) Metropolitan Volodymyr -- he is meeting the people," he said.
And to that end, the builders at the Metropolitan's Palace opposite St George's, where the Pope is to stay, are working at breakneck speed.
Carpenters sand floors, craftsmen apply gold leaf to woodwork and engineers test a lift -- a necessity wherever the frail 81-year-old pontiff travels. Even a podium in a field where he will preach to 500,000 has been fitted with one.
"Naturally it is very difficult to prepare everything as we would like to," Husar said. "But I think it will be sufficient to receive the Holy Father in a dignified manner."