July 12 2021 First of all, I would like to emphasize that the wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine, between the parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space, to my mind is our great common misfortune and tragedy…. But these are also the result of deliberate efforts by those forces that have always sought to undermine our unity….Hence the attempts to play on the ”national question“ and sow discord among people, the overarching goal being to divide and then to pit the parts of a single people against one another. Vladimir Putin, “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”

Feb 12, 2012 MOSCOW (Reuters) – The head of the Russian Orthodox church on Wednesday called the 12 years of Vladimir Putin’s rule a “miracle of God.”

I began writing this post near the end of February 2022, on tenterhooks along with much of the world about the likelihood of a war being unleashed by Russian military forces on the sovereign territory of Ukraine. At the same time, preparations were underway in Rome to facilitate a meeting between Pope Francis, supreme pontiff of the world-wide Catholic Church, and  the primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia, perhaps as soon as June or July of 2022, although the venue had not yet been chosen. So I learned from one of the Google alerts that were popping up daily in my Inbox. Not only was I nonplussed and distressed by this development, I was taking it very personally.

Jan 24 2022 Peace is an aspiration Patriarch Kirill shares with the pope, a goal they should strive for together. During the Christmas service, on Jan. 7 in the Russian calendar, the patriarch thanked Pope Francis for a fraternal message and added, “Hopefully, these relations will translate into many and many kind joint actions, including those aimed at achieving peace where there is no peace today,” according to Tass, a Russian news agency.

As a practising Christian, I am a bundle of contradictions spiritual, historical, geopolitical and personal. As this blog – “What am I doing here?” –  announces itself, I am a baptised and active member of a parish within the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada. From this fact all other affinities have developed – with Ukrainian Catholics, with the Patriarchate of Constantinople, with the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, with oblates and brothers of the Order of Saint Benedict and, God help me, with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Then Russian military forces invaded sovereign Ukrainian territory on February 24, 2022.

February 27 2022 “Religious exceptionalism, self-identification as ‘Holy Russia,’ ‘The Third Rome, and the Fourth cannot be,’ resided in the Russian religious consciousness as radical conservatism. And Russian religious nationalism is not the nationalism of a small nation that wants to survive. It is mainly imperial nationalism.”

Prince Volodomyr baptises the people of Kyivan Rus 988 AD

I will try to be succinct.The Church into which I was baptised in 1944 was still called the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church of Canada. The “Greek” is there not because its members and clergy were Greeks (although I did try to pass myself off as a Greek for awhile in elementary school) but because we were Greek Orthodox (as opposed to Roman or Latin Catholics). We were descended from that initial baptism of Kyivan Rus in 988 by its prince Volodomyr (Vladimir) who had accepted Christianity from Greek-speaking Byzantium. (The Moscow church would not get its first Primate until 1322.) Not only was Byzantium’s capital, Constantinople (now Istanbul) situated west of Rus on the Black Sea , it was the Second Rome, still draped in Imperial splendour compared to the ruined First Rome, now fallen to various barbarians and usurpers, and sacked, plundered, vandalized with many of its citizens enslaved.  Who would not want to be a Byzantine? But then, catastrophe.

Russian clergy (archival)

With the utter destruction of Kyiv by Mongols in 1240  and the massacre of its population (after its citizens had refused to surrender), the Mongols advanced unstoppably into Hungary and Poland. And the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and its spiritual leader the Metropolitan were not to return to Kyiv until late in the fifteenth century. For all the vicissitudes of history, however, Ukrainian Orthodoxy remained within the jurisdiction of Constantinople until – another catastrophe! –  the Kyivan Metropolia was annexed by the Patriarchate of Moscow in 1685. It must be said, however, that Ukrainian bishops were powerful churchmen throughout the 18th century in the Russian empire, their superior education setting them apart from their Russian counterparts. And a century later, all the ancient Ukrainian dioceses had been incorporated into dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church, itself the product of missionary work from Kyiv, and all its spiritual leadership was occupied by ethnic Russians.

Early one evening in May 2018, days before the annual parade celebrating the Soviet victory in World War II, a convoy of military trucks carrying long-range nuclear weapons trundled to a halt on the Russian capital’s ring road.As police officers stood guard, two Russian Orthodox priests wearing cassocks and holding Bibles climbed out of a vehicle and began sprinkling holy water on the stationary Topol and Yars intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Meanwhile,  another shock to Ukrainian Orthodoxy in central Ukraine had been administered by the Union of Brest in 1596 (an event of “tragic” proportions to some Orthodox even today). That region had been incorporated into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a large and populous federation ruled by a single King of Poland. Ethnically diverse and relatively tolerant of diverse Christian and Jewish religious communities, its Constitution nevertheless acknowledged Catholicism as the “dominant religion.” At the time of the Union, the main concern of the bishops was the consequences to their episcopates of internal Polish affairs. The Moscow threat was not very strong in 1595/6 as it became later. Nevertheless, it is useful to be reminded in the swirl of disinformation that emanates from Moscow that not all Ukrainians have lived in the “spiritual realm” of the Moscow Patriarchate.

St Josephat Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral in Edmonton

Thus was created the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Byzantine/Orthodox in its rites but in full communion with the worldwide Catholic Church.(As recently as 1995, the spiritual head of much of world Orthodoxy, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople -never of Istanbul, please – insisted that the “Eastern Catholic churches” should be regarded as “irregular communities.” For their part, the Roman Church post-Vatican Two no longer labels the Orthodox as “schismatic” although the accusation still finds purchase – online where I found it – “It would be very difficult to find the right name for this so-called Church. Heretic and schismatic ‘Church’ is highly fitting, however.”)

On Feb. 5, 2015, Crux noted: “During the Soviet era, no church produced more martyrs in percentage terms or suffered more vicious crackdowns. In light of that history, Greek Catholics become understandably nervous anytime they see Russian forces crossing their borders, or insurgents armed and supported by Moscow trying to slice off pieces of Ukrainian territory.” Therefore, it would be in the interest of the Vatican to take millions of Ukrainian Catholics under its wings.

(I become sensitive to a kind of tone-deafness on the pontiff’s part when, for example, on March 25 2022 Pope Francis  “consecrated Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary with a prayer asking for peace in the world.” Right Rev. Fr Roman Bozyk, Dean of Theology at St Andrew’s College, University of Manitoba, would remind the Holy Father that Russians and Ukrainians are not one people – this is Putin’s line -and that “Kyiv has been dedicated to the Theotokos (Mother of God) since the 11th century” and his consecration is redundant.)

Embedded in Orthodox Christianity in Canada, I remained pretty much unconcerned with the vicissitudes of Christianity in the Old Country. As an undergraduate  at the University of Alberta in the 1960s, I took a smattering of courses in Soviet Studies, understood that the Ukr/USSR was an atheist state, watched jerky and grainy newsreel footage of the toppling of church domes, and knew from relatives’ letters from Ukraine that the women in the village that Baba had left behind furtively fasted, taught their young children basic prayers, wrote pysanky and even went once a year to the village’s (Russian Orthodox) church although none of their grown children did such a thing. On my first visit to the village in 1984, that church was pointed out to me as the one “your Baba went to,” as a girl, although in Canada, ironically, she was an adherent of the pro-Soviet Ukrainian Farm and Labour Temple Association and I never saw her in church until my wedding in 1972.

St John the Baptist Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral, Edmonton

On my father’s side of the family, however, “church” was a very different story. The Kostashes had emigrated in 1900 from a Galicia that was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – that had earlier absorbed the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth – and therefore Ukrainians in Galicia were historically, and remained, Ukrainian Catholic. This aspect of their identity – that in fact my Galician grandparents had been baptised in Dzhuriv and in Tulova as Greek Catholics – went unnoticed by me for a long time.

I had been raised in the city in a made-in-Canada Orthodox Church (the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada incorporated by an Act of Parliament in 1929) to which a great-uncle and some great-aunts  and various others of the Ukrainian-Albertan intelligentsia had attached themselves, eventually carrying into it my parents. The founders of the UOCC not only seized the opportunity in Canada to return to the ancient faith of  Rus: they decided also to bring it up-to-Canadian-date, so to speak, having been deeply influenced by the model of Protestantism (Presbyterians) in the immigrant settlements of western Canada. Uniquely in Orthodoxy, congregations of the UOCC act as trustees of their own church property, consent to the appointment and dismissal of priests, govern as a General Council of clerical and lay members, and manage their lay organizations independently of episcopal authority..(This is important for the women’s organizations: although the parish priest attends their meetings, he is ex officio and has no voting authority. He can however, request to be on the agenda.)

Greek prayer rope/bracelet

Yet, I was aware that there were Ukrainian Canadians of my generation in Edmonton who went to Roman Catholic not public schools, and I thought them anomalous. What were they doing at St Joseph’s Composite High School (only two blocks away from our Orthodox Cathedral) among Polish and Italian and Irish classmates under the scholastic supervision of nuns in medieval dress and, as I imagined, frequently on their knees, hands bound in ropes of rosary beads and chanting in Latin? (Even in the privacy of our parents’ homes or anywhere else, we Orthodox didn’t “do” rosaries, although many did adopt the Greek prayer rope as a substitute.) It’s true that the Ukrainian Catholic kids went to churches mounted with bulbous domes just as ours were and whose interiors were as gorgeously adorned with icons and embroidered altar cloths. Their parish priests were also married, and wore similar vestments ; and their liturgies and hymnals are practically identical. But not wholly. For here’s the thing: over them all loomed the figure of their supreme spiritual authority, the Pope.

May 9 2022 When Pope Francis visited the Russian ambassador to the Holy See Feb. 25, the day after the war started, this was widely perceived in the West as a diplomatic peace initiative…The repeated calls for peace in Ukraine by Pope Francis have hitherto been interpreted by the Russian Orthodox Church as support for the central Russian justification of the war that peace in the Donbas was threatened by Ukrainian extremists and has to be restored by the Russian special military operation.

When I once took part in a series of classes (in the company of Ukrainian Catholic friends) on the Catechism [summary of doctrine] of the Ukrainian Catholic Church and had been assured by my priest that this would not imperil my Orthodox soul, I was struck by the virtual interchangeability of our Catechisms, except for this inclusion (there are others) in their liturgical prayer: “Among the first, remember, O Lord, our most holy universal Pontiff [name] Pope of Rome.” In the Orthodox world, said Pontiff is the Bishop of Rome but never included in our corporate prayer. (News flash from 2007: “A joint commission of Orthodox and Catholic theologians has agreed that the Pope has primacy over all bishops, though disagreements about the extent of his authority still continue.”)

After a prolonged, by decades, absence from participation as a parish member of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada, I returned; and learned that while I had been busy as a professional writer who “dipped into” Orthodox worship only as a visitor when abroad in need of spiritual refreshment (I had never resisted the elemental allure of Byzantine interiors), the UOCC had

Hagia Sophia interior

ended Ukrainian Orthodoxy’s long separation from the patriarchate of Constantinople through whom we had been baptised back in 988 AD. In 1990, Eucharistic Union was re-established (common sharing in the sacrament of Holy Communion), bringing us Canadians into communion with much of world Orthodoxy. On each of my visits to Hagia Sophia in Istanbul – that 6th century masterpiece of Byzantine architecture now a mosque – I stood in profound awe that in this very space I had a source and origin of identity. (An aside here for an observation I made of a listing on the Departures flight board in Athens airport in 2019: in English I was looking for the flight to Istanbul; in Greek, for Kωνσταντινούπολη/Constantinople. True story.)

It did eventually dawn on me as well that being in communion with “world Orthodoxy” also put me in communion with the Russian Orthodox Church, the most populous Orthodox jurisdiction in the world. This did not sit well with me.

May 4, 2022: “We do not want to fight against anyone. Russia has never attacked anyone,” said Patriarch Kirill of Moscow in his sermon yesterday, continuing his steadfast support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has caused the deaths of innocent Ukrainian Orthodox civilians.

With Ukraine’s independence as a sovereign state after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was inevitable that at least a portion of its Orthodox population under the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate would seek an equally independent Church. And so it came to pass. In 2019 Patriarch Bartholomew in Constantinople granted autocephaly (self-governance) to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) under its primate, Epiphanius, the Metropolitan of Kyiv and all Ukraine. Patriarch Kirill was so displeased with this “interference” by Constantinople that he dissolved the Russian Orthodox Church’s Eucharistic Communion with Constantinople and made a pivot to the Vatican.

May 4 2022 The week before his Zoom call with Francis, Kirill, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, described the war in Ukraine as a “metaphysical” struggle against a godless international order based on “excess consumption” and “gay parades.”  Pope Francis said in an interview published Tuesday that he told Patriarch Kirill — the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church — not to “transform himself into Putin’s altar boy,” CNN reported Wednesday.

Patriarch Kirill and President Putin

Also in 2018, I had become an oblate of the Order of Saint Benedict, about which I have written in an earlier blog post. I was accepted as a baptised Christian (an ObOSB is not necessarily a Roman Catholic) Over the years, because of retreats at the Benedictine Abbey of St Peter in Muenster, Saskatchewan, in the company of the brothers I became immersed in their daily cycle of prayers and psalmody, attended Sunday Masses, ate meals in the refectory and enjoyed convivial conversation with them all, especially the  Abbot and Guest Master, and, very important, spent hours reading in the Oblates’ reading room choosing from a library of quite extraordinary Benedictine-inspired literature. I shared their enthusiasm (mostly) for the reinvigorated papacy led by Supreme Pontiff Francis. Looking back on my more recent visits (resumed post-Covid in 2021), I am struck by the equanimity, even serenity, of the community’s response to the very issues that agitated me – why can’t women be priests? how should we settlers establish relationships with Indigenous neighbours? do you think the Great Schism of 1054 that split the universal Church into East and West can be healed?

April 27 2022 By the wanton slaughter of innocents in Bucha, in Mariupol’, and throughout Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has stigmatized himself with the mark of Cain. Kirill has tried to mask that stigma. For the Bishop of Rome to have met with Kirill as if the Russian were a true religious leader would have bitterly disappointed Catholic and Orthodox Ukrainians, who would not unreasonably have regarded it as a betrayal; it would have depleted the Holy See’s moral capital in world affairs; and it would have contributed nothing to peace.

Abbey grounds in Feb 2022

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. But the monks of St Peter’s live according to the sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict, in whose Prologue Benedict exhorts: “Never departing from [God’s] guidance, remaining in the monastery until death…so we may eventually enter into the Kingdom of God.” Not even the war in Ukraine seemed to disturb their composure as a community, to judge from their website. Do you suppose there is a lesson in this?

May 11 2022 Francis names this truth, and defends the other logic—God’s logic, the path of mercy—even after most of us have given up on it. God’s logic recognizes the depth of human relationship. It demands our mutual recognition as fellow creatures. The pope’s stance needs no clarification. It could not be clearer. Amidst the roar of weapons and cries of grief, he stands among the victims, their blood on his cassock, begging for peace, and ready to talk to anyone and to do anything to bring it about.

Part Two: Peace in a Time of War

August 9-12, 2018, in Saskatoon SK, I attended the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada (UOCC). In 1918, just as the first immigrants were burying their first dead, the Church got its start in that city when a group of disaffected Ukrainian Catholics (thus far the majority of Ukrainian immigrants to Canada) and “progressive” (read: social democrat) intellectuals  decided to organize a Ukrainian Orthodox Church, a Church with which, in short order, members of my grandparents’ family affiliated. And so it came to pass that I was baptized into the UOCC in an Edmonton parish: how could I let the ancestors down by not showing up to celebrate their foresight in once again becoming Orthodox?

Besides, excited rumours were circulating that His All Holiness Bartholomew I, Archbishop of Constantinople (aka Istanbul), New Rome and Ecumenical [Highest Dignitary] Patriarch, the Spiritual Head of World Orthodoxy, First Among Equals, was about to grant – or commit to granting – independence to the much-beleaguered Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Kyiv.

What a spiritual gift to our Jubilee celebrations in Saskatchewan if that were true!

But I am getting ahead of myself. And this is complicated history, which I will try to make as easy to follow as I can. After all, there was once a time when I couldn’t make head or tail of it myself. (I welcome easy-to-understand correction of egregious errors.)

The UOCC was a new creature in Ukrainian Orthodoxy: made-in-Canada, with no connections with any Church in Ukraine, least of all with the only legal Orthodox entity on Ukrainian lands, the Russian Orthodox Church, headed by the Moscow Patriarch. So, inspired in part by the practices of Presbyterians, for example, in Alberta who ran missions among the Ukrainian settlers,  the UOCC  decided its lay members, men and women (!), would have a voice and vote in the Church’s administrative matters, right up to the top stratum. (Remind me sometime to tell you what it is like to vote for a Bishop – think incense, Holy Water and ballot box combined.) Matters of doctrine and rites, of course, were reserved for the clergy. But everyone together wanted consistency with Eastern Christianity, the mother lode of Ukrainian spiritual legacies.

By the time I was seven years old, the UOCC had almost 300 congregations, 70 priests and 110,000 adherents. It would grow from there but, sadly, on its 100th birthday, the demographics are not hopeful. Even so, the UOCC may be embraced as “the Light of Truth for Contemporary Orthodoxy,” according to Very Reverend Fr. Roman Bozyk, Dean of Theology at St. Andrew’s College at the University of Manitoba, at a special symposium at the Jubilee. By which he meant – anticipating skepticism – our “heritage of Canadian mentality: a mosaic of influences, the British heritage of fair play, with clergy and laity working together. Our lay groups, especially women’s, are fundamental to our strength.” And, then, possibly as a nod to what was coming down the pike from Constantinople and Kyiv: “We do not change our practices to please a Czar.”

Ukrainians – or, rather, the people who would become Ukrainians – were baptized into Eastern Christianity  in 988 when Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir) of Kyiv chose Byzantine (Greek) over Roman (Latin) Christianity. Constantinople thus became the Mother Church of the Kyivan Church. Grievously, in 1240, Kyiv fell to the Mongols, who razed it, but to the north a heretofore small fishing village, Moscow, gained prominence, and by 1453, when Constantinople (Byzantium) fell to the Ottoman Turks, the Grand Duchy of Moscow declared itself the Third Rome (after Imperial Rome and the New Rome of Constantine’s city). In 1686, after a series of ruinous wars, the Ukrainian Orthodox church was separated from Constantinople and subordinated to the Moscow patriarchate, the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople remaining spiritual head of both.

Moving smartly along…we arrive at the 1920s and a brief period when the Bolsheviks allowed a Ukrainian Independent Orthodox Church to function but in 1927 its Spiritual Head was arrested by the NKVD and executed in 1937. The early 1930s and again after the Second World War saw the destruction of tens of its bishops, thousands of its priests and tens of thousands of its lay activists. And we finally arrive at the break-up of the Soviet Union and the independence of Ukraine in 1991, the arrival of Bartholomew I to the Ecumenical Patriarchal Throne in Constantinople (Istanbul), the looming split of the Orthodox Church in Kyiv from the Moscow Patriarchate – and (coincidentally?) the reception of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada into the Ecumenical Patriarchate, bringing us into communion with the four Ancient Patriarchates – Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch and Constantinople (but not, alas, with Rome, another long story).

From this point on, Church business in Ukraine becomes increasingly complicated and, to my mind, messy, but not without interest to us Ukrainian-Canadians, Orthodox and Catholic. Fights over property, defrockings and excommunications, meddling of nationalist political groups, expose of former NKVD agents and informers within the Russian Orthodox Church…Under the presidency of Vladimir Putin in Russia, church relations became strained to the breaking point. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, there began a wide-spread movement of Ukrainian parishes from Moscow’s patriarchate to that of “schismatic” and unrecognized Kyiv (almost half of the Russian Orthodox Church’s parishioners live in Ukraine).

With the Russian-sponsored war and occupation of eastern Ukrainian territory also in 2014, Ukrainian Orthodox faithful were confronted with images of Russian priests blessing Russian soldiers and weapons to the front, making visits to volunteers of the “Russian Orthodox Army,” where Russian soldiers are photographed kissing an icon of Putin, with Patriarch Kiril of Moscow, far from condemning the Russian invasion and occupation, calling President Putin a “miracle from God” – well, how can any self-respecting Ukrainian Orthodox Christian stay with  a Church that requires her to pray for the well-being of Patriarch Kiril? Asia News reports that the 1030th anniversary of the Baptism of Kyivan Rus was celebrated in Moscow by Patr. Kiril – because he has been barred from Ukraine. The Kyivan Patriarch, Filaret, had already suggested that Putin is “possessed by Satan.” 

This brings us to current events in the Fall of 2018, hastened by a request, in April, 2018, by the Parliament of Ukraine to Patr. Bartholomew that he grant full independence to the break-away UOC – Kyiv Patriarchate. Naturally, Moscow objects but broad support comes from Ukrainian Orthodox bishops abroad. Patr. Bartholomew is the soul of discretion until September 7 when he indicates he is in favour of granting Parliament’s request. This “bombshell” explodes a mere week after Patr. Kiril visited Constantinople, during an admittedly “frosty” meeting, after which the Russian delegates did not even stay for dinner.

A propaganda war heats up: Moscow “slams” Constantinople and warns against “fake news” coming from that source. Constantinople is of the belief that it never did “hand over” the territory of Ukraine to the Russian church in the first place (i.e. in 1686). “The Moscow Church is a daughter of the Ukrainian Church, which is a daughter of the Ecumenical Patriarchate.” Besides, it was medieval Kyivan Rus that was baptized, not Russia. Publicorthodoxy.org reports that Russian military intelligence has sought to “hack and surveil His Holiness Bartholomew” as reported by Associated Press: what did Patr. Kiril know and when did he know it?

By this time international media are chasing this story. I read items from Kyiv Post,  Economist, TASS, Washington Post, Greek Reporter, Christian Today, Tablet, Irish Times and Eurasia Daily Monitor, among others, as Google Alerts pop up in my Inbox. Atlantic Council reports: “It’s no exaggeration to write that the granting of autocephaly [independence] from the Russian Orthodox Church to Ukraine’s millions of Orthodox believers is as significant as the disintegration of the USSR for Ukraine.” 

From my perch in Canada, I am amazed. That Orthodoxy – usually a footnote in the annals of (Western) Christendom – is so interesting to outsiders.That unfamiliar (Greek)vocabulary circulates: Exarch, Patriarch, Ecumenical, Synod, Metropolia. That the faces and voices of Orthodox clergy are posted on social media. That the spiritual hunger of Christians neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant has become news!

So perhaps you can understand what a joy it was for me to see, just a few days ago, the video and photo of Ukraine President Pyotr Poroshenko in Kyiv, greeting UOCC’s very own Bishop, His Grace Ilarion, an envoy along with American Archbishop Daniel, of the Ecumenical Patriarch,  “dispatched by the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians,” as AP reported, “to prepare for establishing a Ukrainian church that is ecclesiastically independent from the Russian Orthodox Church.”

What a birthday present for the ancestors!

Fast forward a decade and I was busy travelling around most of Slavic Europe, including Ukraine, in search of the history, politics and culture that explained my generation of ’68 under Communism. I had already written a book about the Sixties in Canada and now was eager to find out how my counterparts in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and, sort of, in Ukraine experienced their 1960s. The book that resulted, Bloodlines: A Journey Into Eastern Europe (1993), my first real achievement of creative nonfiction, records the rather bruising reality check I experienced as a Western feminist and New Leftist. But the journey had taken me beyond social and political realities. I realized that, since my sojourn in Two Hills, I had been excavating successive layers of personal identity and now, far from having come to bedrock in the history of Eastern Europe, I had laid bare an unsuspected deeper layer, Byzantium.

In retrospect, I can see how it crept up. As mentioned in an earlier post, I had frequently sought peace and quiet of mind and spirit in Orthodox churches and monasteries as I moved around. But these were not yet “Byzantium” to me but simply sites of cultural familiarity. Then I picked up on the jokey contrasts made by local wits between the cultures of espresso vs Turkish coffee, wine vs vodka, Austro-Hungarian vs Ottoman Turkish streetscapes, Latin vs Cyrillic alphabets, right-bank vs left-bank Danube, and the barely-disguised desire of speakers to be associated with the “European” side of the equations. Most dramatically, in Warsaw, after interviewing a young historian of modern Polish history, I walked with him along the city walls above the Vistula River, and followed his gaze as he pointed eastward, across the river to the Praga district, and to the prominent silhouette of a Russian Orthodox church, and exclaimed, “There is Asia!”

I was stunned. “Wait a minute,” I wanted to protest. “My relatives live over there, way east, and they’re not Asians,” but I caught myself on the defensive: what was this anxiety that he and I shared not to be excluded from “Europe”? More to the point, why did an Orthodox church lie outside Europe in this historian’s mind?

In 1988 I was in Kyiv, capital of the fast-receding Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, during the commemorations of the 1000th anniversary of the Christianization – or Baptism – of Kyiv and the land of Rus’ in 988. Christianity was brought to what would become the Ukrainian people not from Rome but from Constantinople. It is an oft-told tale, of how emissaries of Prince Volodymyr of Rus’, still a pagan, had ventured into the great church of Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, in Constantinople, stood under its immense dome and wondered whether they had been transported to Heaven. Their report convinced Volodymyr to establish Byzantine Christianity on his lands and it was this Baptism that we were celebrating in Kyiv with all the pomp and circumstance as could be mustered by clergy and politicos not to mention the faithful masses. It took me another decade to get started but I knew that I had to write a book about Byzantium, the matrix, the Mother Lode, the progenitrix of the spiritual and popular culture of the Ukrainians, including those emigrants 900 years later who built those onion-domed churches on the Canadian prairie and parkland.

But Byzantium is huge. A thousand years of imperial history: the Second Rome, after the fall of that other one, that endured until the Ottoman conquest in 1453. Immensely wealthy and powerful at its zenith, missionary to the southern and eastern Slavs, repository of Hellenic arts and sciences, interlocutor with neighbouring Islam, “The golden smithies of the Emperor! Marbles of the dancing floor,” as W. B. Yeats had it – what would be my subject?

I tell that story in Prodigal Daughter, how I stumbled on the iconographic representation of St Demetrius of Thessalonica, Great Martyr and Myrrh-streamer, martyred in 304 AD in the northern Greek city of Thessalonica, in the last of the Roman persecutions of Christians. He returned in the sixth century to defend his beloved city by performing miracles that saved it from marauding Slavic tribes. Perhaps the even greater miracle was that these same Slavs would in their turn come to venerate him as one of their own, a saint of Byzantine Christianity safeguarded for them in the Orthodox Church. I knew I had my subject: I would follow Demetrius around the Byzantine world and tell the tale of my people and his.

And so I went back to church. For purely research purposes, you understand – to immerse myself in the world of St Demetrius’s legacy as lived by Ukrainian Orthodox Christians of Canada. I started in Saskatoon (where I was writer-in-residence for a year) in Holy Trinity Cathedral, I bought my first Bible, the Orthodox Study Bible Revised King James Version, I memorized whole swatches of Liturgy, belted out the ancient hymns…and began to write my book. The book was published in 2010 and I’m still in church.