Gregory Turko (February 11, 1888 - March 10, 1977, Edmonton, Alberta) was born “in one of the Carpathian Villages” to a family of Ivan and Anastasia Turko. Gregory went to the Ukrainian Gimnasium in Peremyshl. In 1915, he married Maria Horodetska. Turko worked for the tobacco industry. He fought in WWI and WWII.
Turko immigrated to Canada after WWII through the German camps of Displaced Persons and settled in Calgary. After his wife passed away, he moved to Edmonton, where in 1967, he married Ksenia Shklanka. Turko was a member of the Edmonton Branch of the Brotherhood of Former Soldiers of the First Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army (Станиця Братства колишніх вояків Першої української дивізії Української національної армії в Едмонтоні) and Ukrainian War Veterans Association of Canada.
Source:
Турко, Ксеня. “Спомин про бл. П. Григорія Турка.” Ukrainian News, april 21, 1977, p. 6.
Composer Stefania Turkewich-Lukianowicz (b. 1898, Lviv, Ukraine, d. 1977, Cambridge, United Kingdom) was born into a priestly family active in Ukrainian choral music. She studied in Lviv, in Vienna with Guido Adler, in Berlin with Arnold Schoenberg and in Prague with Zdeněk Nejedlý and Vitězslav Novák. She taught theory, musicology and composition at the Lysenko Music Institute in Lviv, Lviv University and the Lviv Institute of Folk Art. In 1944 she fled Ukraine and settled in the United Kingdom in 1946. Her music combined elements of traditional Ukrainian music with the avant-garde compositional techniques of the Second Viennese School, making her the most experimental and innovative Ukrainian composer of her generation, and also Ukraine’s first professional woman composer. Her output includes seven symphonies, four children’s operas, five ballets, chamber music, solo piano music, art songs and sacred choral music, some of which was lost during the Second World War and little of which has been published.