Moustafa the night clerk, in an aureole of black curls, had bent his head over a medical textbook under a small shaded lamp at the miniscule Reception. He smiled dozily at my arrival, and left his duties at the textbook to lead me up to the roof to show me where breakfast would be served. I was staring out to the starry Sea of Marmara, enveloped by the plushness of the night, when Moustafa gently directed me to turn around. There, swelling up at us from the night sky, from a blackness as if from another world, heaved the vaulted floodlit bulk of Hagia Sophia, queen of churches in the Byzantine cosmos. It seemed to hang in the air right above us under the roof of heaven.

The Greeks called the church Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom, the Ottomans, Aya Sofya. They made a mosque of it in 1453, eventually plastered over the mosaics and erected four superb minarets at its four corners. Sultan Murat IV, the Conqueror of Baghdad, delighted in this incomparable mosque, and when he came there to pray, attendants hung cages of singing birds near the southern door, particularly nightingales, “so that their sweet notes, mingled with those of the muezzins’ voices, filled the mosque with a harmony approaching that of paradise.”

My mouth will speak words of wisdom, the utterance of my heart will give understanding. Ps 49 3:1-2

For almost a thousand years (537 CE – 1453) the great Mother Church of Byzantium, Hagia Sophia, had stood triumphant in Constantinople as the place in all of Christendom where those who entered “knew not whether they had entered Paradise” (as recorded of an awestruck tenth-century emissary  from pagan Rus to the Imperial capital on the Bosphorus.) But 1453 – catastrophe! Holy Wisdom may have seemed eternal but the Byzantine Empire was decidedly rickety and Constantine’s city dangerously vulnerable to assault. It fell (or was conquered, depending on where you stood) to the Ottoman Turks on Tuesday May 29 when sultan Mehmed II cantered through shattered gates in triumph and claimed Hagia Sophia for Muslim worship.

As Ayasofya it was a mosque until the Ottoman Empire in its turn fell in the aftermath of the Great War, a secular republic was proclaimed and in 1934 the Ayasofya mosque was decommissioned, so to speak, and declared a museum, affiliated with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Fifty years later, it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List. So far, so secular.

In the early 1990s, however, in what professor of Islamic Studies at Stanford University Anna Bigelow called “rituals of majoritarian grievance” (in a webinar October 9 2020), crowds of Muslim worshippers began to congregate to pray outside Ayasofya Müzesi on the anniversary of the Conquest.  Then massive petitions circulated online to have it reconverted to a mosque. In June 2018 a survey among 6000 Turks older than 18 asked: “Should Hagia Sophia be converted into a mosque and open to worship?” YES: 78.6%; NO 21.4%

Muslim crowds outside Hagia Sophia

Good as done.

A council of State decision, followed by a presidential decree on July 10 2020, “within hours” annulled the 1934 regulation. In the Globe and Mail Michael Coren wrote: “…the Islamic call to prayer was recited, and the museum’s social media pages were shuttered.”  It was reported that, after signing the decree,Turkey’s excitable president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was so moved that he had been unable to sleep all night. Four days later “thousands” of Muslim faithful were on their way to Ayasofya for the first Friday prayers in 86 years.

I clipped and printed out many accounts of that day, from nonpartisan reportage to partisan – achingly, exuberantly, triumphantly, mournfully partisan – testimonials and homilies, press releases and op eds.

President Erdogan arrives in Hagia Sophia

Accompanied by 500 dignitaries, cheered on by those thousands who had arrived and were now packed in the newly-segregated (men and women) squares around the mosque. President Erdoğan arrived at noon, entered the church/museum/mosque and took his place as Prof.Ali Erbaş, head of the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs, climbed up on the minbar, gripping the hilt of the “sword of conquest” and gave his sermon. According to a post on Public Orthodoxy, “Erbaş’s sermon presents a sacred narrative of Turkish national history, where the Turkish state is appointed by God to be the patron of all who live within its dominion.”  The drawn sword, it turns out, dates back to the fifteenth-century “signifying that Hagia Sophia was a mosque acquired through holy warfare.”

A hotel manager: “Ayasofya is reconquered.” His wife: “Turkey’s Muslims have taken back what was theirs.”

A retired businessman: “This is a festival for us today. We are so happy.”

President Erdoğan: “This is Hagia Sophia breaking away from its captivity chains. It was the greatest dream of our youth.”

Adem Yilmaz, worshipper: “This turned into a place where all hearts beat at once.”

UNESCO World Heritage Site: “The Grand Hagia Sophia Mosque.”

“As for Agia Sophia, well, it depends on degrees. Is there some Muslim prayer, and then the museum resumes? I heard they cover the mosaics for some time everyday. It is hard to judge if one is not there to see. As a woman, I know I would be a lot happier to be in a museum free of the headscarf police in a mosque. Many feel it was a purely political gimmick, fear-mongering and garnering Islamic prestige and power politics.’ [an email from a friend in Athens]

Curtains cover the apse mosaic

Here and there were people who wondered what was going to happen to the “human images” – a stupendous achievement of Byzantine mosaic art and spirituality – that are offensive to Muslims at prayer. Straight off, in fact, to cover as needed the image of the Mother of God and Christ Child, workers clambered up and into the sky-high apse and installed curtains, but so far there seems no intention to replaster the images. Scholars and conservationists raised concerns about the status of the on-going conservation work now that the museum’s stewardship has been transferred to a religious authority: tesserae on mosaics are becoming detached, red paint from the 1980s has to be removed, research on the mortar in the ancient brick walls is still underway.

But normally, I think it fair to say, the western reading public would not overly-concern itself with the political and religious agenda at play in the fate of an old church just barely inside Europe. Take Mark Twain, who visited Hagia Sophia in 1869:

How Hagia Sophia became a museum

I had been reading his The Innocents Abroad on the sun-struck roof of the hotel, the paperback propped up against a salt shaker, while I scooped up breakfast – a boiled egg, packets of cream cheese and cherry jam and honey, black and green olives, tomato and cucumber slices, bread, cookies, tea, with wasps crawling over my honey-sticky fingers. ”I do not think much of the Mosque of St. Sophia,” Twain wrote. “I suppose I lack appreciation. We will let it go at that. It is the rustiest old barn in heathendom.”

Perhaps it was a shambolic sight, a Byzantine masterpiece stripped of bells and crosses, icons and relics, its ponderous architecture propped up by massive buttresses, its marble flooring randomly covered by strips of carpet, the incomparable mosaics – those that had not been excised – plastered over in the 18th century and not uncovered until 1931.

But when its patron, Roman Emperor Justinian I first entered its completed space in 537, having “disregarded all considerations of expense and raised craftsmen from the whole world,” he is said to have declaimed “Glory be to God, who hath thought me worthy to accomplish so great a work. I have vanquished thee O Solomon!”

Justinian I

Vast in scale, immense in cost, marbles and spolia taken from five pagan monuments – its green marble pillars once fortified Artemis’s own sanctuary in Ephesus – it took only five years to build. In his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon described the emperor himself, “clad in a linen tunic” who “surveyed each day the rapid progress” of ten thousand labourers and made sure each was paid promptly at the end of the day. The bedazzled visitor for centuries to come would behold a sanctuary that contained “forty thousand pound weight of silver, and the holy vases and vestments of the altar were of the purest gold, enriched with inestimable gems.” As for the dome:

… And so the visitor’s mind is lifted up to God and floats aloft, thinking that He cannot be far away, but must love to dwell in this place which He himself has chosen. Procopius, De Aedificiis

Dome of Hagia Sophia

May 27, 1453: Hagia Sophia was thronged with worshippers when the besieging forces of the Ottomans had scaled the “impenetrable” land walls and had already arrived at the church’s mighty bronze doors which eventually gave way. “The pillage continued all day long.” 

Even so, when Sultan Mehmet approached Hagia Sophia as its conqueror, his horse wading through streams of blood, he dismounted and bent over to the ground to scoop up a handful of earth. This he sprinkled over his turban as a sign of humility, or perhaps of penance, for inside the cathedral was unfolding a scene of such bestial ferocity   – rape and murder of priests and nuns and cowering citizens, and the systematic looting and destruction of religious objects, of marble and silver and gold – that the last Patriarch to celebrate Divine Liturgy in Hagia Sophia is said to have taken the Chalice and Host into his hands and disappeared into a crack in the walls, there to be sealed up until the day the Cross triumphs over the Crescent on the church’s stupendous domes and he re-emerges to finish the Mass.

As for the Byzantines, they had vanished into thin air after the conquest, or so I had been led to believe. Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul

What happened next is illuminating – something entirely new in my education – that strips at least some of the cynicism from the text of the brochure distributed by Erdoğan’s AKP [Justice and Development Party [whose symbol is an illuminated light bulb] : “Turkey has been delicately cherishing the historical, cultural and spiritual value of Hagia Sophia since the conquest of Istanbul.”

Mehmet the Conqueror was by no means oblivious to the prestige that the monumental glory of Hagia Sophia lent his ambitions. Without changing the city’s name, he had declared Constantinople the new imperial capital and Holy Wisdom as “the church most suited to the sultan’s dignity.”  As though an awe-struck emissary himself from an abode of the profane, he is said to have wandered through his new possession and climbing into the dome “as the spirit of God had mounted to the fourth story of the heavens.” And at once ordered it repaired and made fitting as the royal mosque. Unsurprisingly, then, Mehmet II was to see himself, as conqueror of Constantinople, Byzantium’s legitimate heir.

Paradise, paradise, heaven, angels, Cosmos: we all want a piece of it. Moustafa at the hotel told me that the postures performed at prayer – the bending at the waist, the crouching on the haunches – were performed in imitation of the postures of the angels who once greeted the Prophet from all the levels of heaven when he was taken up to meet God. I loved that idea, that one could be like the angels with a swoop and a bend of our human body. Though Mustafa’s place of prayer would never countenance music or icon, nor altar or sacrament or priest, it has admitted the dance of the angels.

Myths were fashioned for this enterprise. A mythical ruler, Yanko bin Madyan, had been guided by a dream to found Constantinople; it was constructed of materials from Solomon’s ruined Temple; its doors from the wood of Noah’s Ark; among its treasures, the stone cradle of baby Jesus. “Sixteenth-century authors…refer to Hagia Sophia as the second Ka’ba for the poor who could not afford the pilgrimage to Mecca.” Of course, at the same time the devout and the visitor would be impressed over and over by the rich visual affirmation of Islam’s subjugation of the Byzanto-Christian past, even as they spread their prayer rugs on its consecrated marble.

Patr. Bartholomew delivers Homily

Orthodox Christians, however, are inconsolable. While Muslims gathered from across Turkey to join the inaugural prayers at the church/museum/mosque, Orthodox Christian church leaders in Greece and the USA announced a Day of Mourning for “the confiscation of our Αγία Σοφία.” “We do not mourn only for ourselves,” His Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros preached from Holy Trinity Archdiocesan Cathedral in New York. “We mourn for the whole world whose loss this is,” he asserted, echoing other clergy including the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, Orthodoxy’s spiritual leader who in his Homily of June 30, 2020, reminded listeners that, as a museum, Hagia Sophia was “the symbolic place of encounter, dialogue, solidarity and mutual understanding between Christianity and Islam.” His words were carefully chosen, given the delicacy of his position in an increasingly nationalist and Islamist Turkish state.

In a sign of solidarity with the Patriarch, Yuri Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada sent out a call to all his clergy and Brothers and Sisters in Christ to “unite in prayer” with his for the intercession of the Blessed Mother of God on July 24, 2020.

To You the Champion, we your City dedicate
a feast of victory and then thanksgiving,
as ones rescued out of sufferings, O Theotokos.
But as you are one with might that is invincible,
from all dangers that can be, deliver us.

Meanwhile, over at the New York Times and Comments posted July 24, 2020 a reader raised the spectre of “colonialism and genocide” in the “taking over” of a people’s [Greek Orthodox] Holy Church, referencing perhaps what Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk had called “conquest fever.” In 1955, in the wake of the 500th anniversary of the “great miracle” of the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, rampaging mobs for two days sacked and burned and raped in the Greek districts of Istanbul. “It later emerged that the organizers of this riot – whose terror…made the city more hellish than the worst orientalist nightmares – had the state’s support and had pillaged the city with its blessing.” Istanbul p.158

Indeed, behind the heated populism of Erdoğan’s rhetoric recorded in AKP’s brochure – that “there was a great demand from the people of Turkey, that this historic building regain its identity as a mosque” – observers see also a neo-Ottomanist second conquest of Constantinople. And a rectification of the “sinful act, a gesture to the West, offensive to the pious,” of having made Hagia Sophia a museum in the first place.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

The status of museum had been conferred by a regulation of the secular Turkish state under its long-revered founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938). When I travelled in Turkey in 2011 and 2015, his image was ubiquitous, from state institutions to neighbourhood bakeries, from schools to gas stations. In 2015 the tour guide disclosed to us, somewhat furtively, that already Erdoğan’s portrait was being included cultishly alongside Atatürk’s in sacrosanct places such as the frontispieces of school textbooks. His critics have accused him of inciting “culture war” and the “clash of civilizations” when he appeals to his political base that, in the symbolism of Ayasofya/Hagia Sophia, he is defending national sovereignty. Meanwhile, they go on, Turkey’s economy is weakening, prices are rising, and his political opponents are censored and worse: arrested and made to disappear in prisons without trial. 

But Kemal, so much admired in the West for his fashioning of a democratic, secular republic from the ashes of “the sick man of Europe,” the Ottoman caliphate, is evaluated by the writer-historian Karen Armstrong as “a dictator who hated Islam…Western approval of Atatürk led many to believe that the West sought to destroy Islam itself.” The Kemalist transformation – abolishing Shariah law, outlawing the Sufi orders and seizure of their properties, and the shutting down of the madrasses [religious schools] – was a “spiritual and cultural trauma” for the devout.

Soviet propaganda poster. Religion is the narcotic of the people

I admit to a certain fellow feeling when I review images of Soviet Bolshevism’s violent take-down of ordinary people’s faith and piety – burning liturgical books, smashing icons, pulling down church cupolas, humiliating village priests, outlawing Christian Feasts and festivities, the whole demonic Carnival of Reason.

Visit to Kadilli Girls’ School, Istanbul

In 2011, thanks to an invitation from my schoolteacher friend Taner, I spent a day at Kandilli Girls’ Anatolian High School in Istanbul, where he taught English. A bevy of girls, unscarved but in uniforms, whisked me around the bucolic grounds and building that overlooked the Bosphorus, chattering in bursts of creditable English, and led me to the office of the Headmaster, Dr.Abdurrahman Memiş, who, Taner informed me, is a scholar of Islamic theology, and I assumed that the green book open on his desk under his folded hands was a copy of the Qur’an. Dr. Memiş does not speak English but through Taner’s translation we managed a conversation of sorts.“In your view,” I enquired conversationally, “do you think there is a possibility of mutual understanding among the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam?” “Yes,” Taner translated his response with enthusiastic approbation, “it is a fact that correct Islam teaches that any Muslim who does not honour the Hebrew and Christian prophets, Mary and Jesus included, cannot call himself a Muslim.”

I was still mulling over the likelihood of some Christians on the wilder shores of the faith honouring the prophets of other people’s faith when I was whisked onward to the school’s Assembly Hall and onto the stage festooned with balloons and large cut-out letters spelling my name. I was presented an enormous bouquet of flowers, then for an hour I responded to the questions about my books volleyed at me from two students onstage with me, who had carefully studied my website. The students and faculty had been attentive enough that I ventured a new topic: the rather emotionally-charged subject of how an Orthodox Christian from the West might feel about the monuments of Byzantium, not to mention the very memory of it, disappearing under Ottoman/Turkish triumphalism. Take the very name, Istanbul. From the fourth century of its founding by Roman Emperor, Constantine, it was called Constantinople, a name not officially changed to Istanbul until 1930; even the Ottomans had kept the Byzantine name. The name Istanbul itself lightly conceals its origins in the Greek phrase, “eis ten polin,” in the city, there being only one city worth mentioning.

The other day, I said, I had taken a photograph of a bright, new monument erected just off a main thoroughfare, a statue of Fatih Sultan Mehmet in a simple cloak and turban and posed with his left hand held peaceably across his chest. Fatih means Conqueror, the Conqueror. “You conquered Constantinople,” I said, “but for us it fell, and great were our lamentations.”

A few days later at my hotel, I picked up a booklet advertising the “Panorama 1453 History Museum.” In his Foreword, the mayor of Istanbul writes that the museum has been opened “in order to bring to life the images of those bewitching moments [of the Conquest]”. The booklet reproduces some of those images, which I saw for myself in 2015. Mehmet front and centre on a noble steed gesturing toward the walls of Constantinople, feats of engineering that blasted open the walls that had stood impenetrable for a thousand years, a scene of Janissaries raising the Ottoman flag on the devastated ramparts. “You shall hear the shouting of Taqbir (‘God is great!’) by Fatih Sultan Mehmet’s thousands of soldiers and the victory marches played by his janissary band,” the brochure came to a rousing climax.

In 2015, as far as I could tell, I was the sole non-Turkish woman visitor in the crowd, gazing in amazement at the murals, with full sound and light effects of battle. “My” empire had fallen; “theirs” had just begun its 450-year-long imperium on the self-same banks of the Bosphorus and Golden Horn.

On the apse of Hagia Sophia where surges the magnificent mosaic of the Theotokos and Child, a Koranic text had soon been inscribed after 1453, Sura 3 verse 37. In its Christian context, the verse refers to the presentation of the girl-child Mary at the Temple in Jerusalem as a dedication by her parents, Joachim and Anna, who deliver her into the care of the High Priest, Zachariah. The Qur’an continues: And thereupon her Sustainer accepted the girl-child with goodly acceptance, and caused her to grow up in goodly growth, and placed her in the care of Zachariah Whenever Zachariah visited her in the sanctuary, he found her provided with food. He would ask: “O Mary, whence came this unto thee?” She would answer: “It is from God; behold, God grants sustenance unto whom He wills, beyond all reckoning.” 

Why that text, in that place? It is not in Christian Scripture; the Feast, Entrance of the Theotokos, commemorates only a Tradition. Because (as I learned from a webinar hosted by the Cantor Center at Stanford University) it is about protection and care, as represented by Mary within Holy Wisdom. The Sura goes on, in Mohammad’s speech to Mary, that the child she will bear “will speak unto mankind in his cradle and in his manhood, and he is of the righteous…And He will teach him the Scripture and wisdom, and the Torah and the Gospel.”  Was it only as a Museum that Hagia Sophia could hold all claims together in one space?

Theotokos in the apse of the Hagia Sophia

They served lentil soup, in the serene little courtyard of the Bazaar of Ottoman Arts and Crafts across from Hagia Sophia, and apple tea, and played Classical Turkish music through speakers under the roof while I kept on reading my travel guidebook.By now I had visited much in the way of museums, mosques, excavations and restorations: overtop the almost invisible Byzantine lie Ottoman marvels. Courtyards and fountains of mosques, men at their ablutions, the gorgeous blues and greens, aquamarines and emeralds, of Iznik tiles that line their interiors, the intertwined polyphony of the muezzin calling out from each mosque, the swirling sweeps of Arabic calligraphy, water, rose gardens, pomegranates, carpets, tea in delicate glasses. An early Ottoman miniature depicts the story of Abraham and Isaac who do not look here like sand-scoured patriarchs roaming the desert but like figures from The Arabian Nights, swathed in silk. From a map in the Museum of Islamic and Ottoman Arts, I saw that Turkey lies at the western margin of most of the Islamic world. The centre of the world lies east.

Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars: 2She hath killed her beasts; she hath mingled her wine; she hath also furnished her table.3She hath sent forth her maidens: she crieth upon the highest places of the city,10The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.11For by me thy days shall be multiplied, and the years of thy life shall be increased.

A comely  woman’s face, her eyebrows arched and eyes heavy-lidded and red mouth succulent, glances sideways from within a mosaic fragment on the cover of the CD. The disc is titled “Kassia”, and records Byzantine hymns from “the first female composer of the Occident.” I have not listened to it very often (to be honest, a little bit of Byzantine religious chant goes a long way) but I’ve opened the cover now to scan the disc’s contents for a particular hymn, and I find it. Number 10 of 18 hymns, “The Fallen Woman.”

The daughter of a wealthy family close to the Imperial court in Constantinople (now Istanbul), Kassia (c.810-843/867 CE)

Icon of Kassia public domain

had the privilege of education in Classical Greek studies (I’m reading this in the CD’s booklet) “such as writing and philosophy as well as early Christian studies.” As a respectable woman, society offered her two destinies: marriage or the nunnery. Fortunately for the history of devotional music, Kassia scooped up her dowry and got herself to a nunnery. (Hildegard of Bingen, Sybil of the Rhine, would not appear for another three centuries.) She flourished in the convent as a philosopher, poet, composer, hymnographer and eventually abbess. Fifty of her hymns are extant and 23 are even today  included in Orthodox Liturgical books. The Orthodox Church has recognized her as a saint and in icons she is portrayed, nun-like, cowled, haloed, and grasping a scroll.

(I love this woman, “feminist pioneer of her time,” according to the CD’s liner notes, also celebrated for her secular gnomic verses and epigrams, 789 of which survive. “I hate the rich man, moaning, as if he were poor.” And, under the lash for her defense of icons, “I hate silence, when it is time to speak.” )

The Hymn

Unknowingly, I have in fact heard her “speak,” that is, have read her words many times, each time during Great Lent, when I have opened for daily reflection the slender compilation, Orthodox Lent, Holy Week and Easter: Liturgical Texts with Commentary by the vicar of St. Mary Magdalen’s Church in Oxford, England, Rev. Canon Hugh Wybrew. Every year during Holy week, for Compline of Great and Holy Tuesday, I have been reading fragments of Kassia’s Great Hymn, sung  during the last service of the day (as Matins for Wednesday) and included in Rev. Wybrew’s compilation, and sometimes called The Fallen Woman.

Kassia’s Hymn for Holy Wednesday, from a collection of Hymns and Canons blogs.bl.uk

While you sat at supper, O Word of God, a woman came to you. At your feet she wept, and took the alabaster jar and anointed your head with sweet oil.[…] “Set me free and forgive me,.” cried the prostitute to Christ.

These lines set a well-known scene, or at least its elements, from the Gospels: a weeping woman, a jar, perfumed oil poured over Jesus’s head, the weeping woman beseeching forgiveness. There is much more to it as I read the liner notes: the woman, who has now merely “fallen into many sins,” is evoked as one who will be among the mourning myrrh-bearers on the way to the Tomb on Easter Sunday prepared to bathe Christ’s bloodied corpse with aromatic oils and herbs. Kassia writes   for her, the one with the alabaster jar, and sets to music an exquisite, lilting, melancholic threnody for women’s voices.

Woe to me, she says, for night holds for me the ecstasy of intemperance gloomy and moonless, a desire for sin. Accept the spring of my tears, you who with clouds spread out the water of the sea. Bend down to me to the lamentation of my heart. […] I will tenderly kiss your sacred feet, I will wipe them again with the hair of my head.

There are many more verses (included in Wybrew), as Kassia gives voice to the repentant harlot (“drowning in sin”) but Judas also makes an appearance enslaved to “the enemy,” as does Eve, who hides in the garden at the sound of God’s footfalls, and even the merchant to whom the Woman cries aloud: “Give me oil of myrrh, with which to anoint the Benefactor.”

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But I am becoming confused. The weeping woman who opened her alabaster jar to pour its fragrant contents on Jesus’s head as he sat at table with his disciples is also a prostitute who pours the oil, and her tears, on his feet, wiping them dry with the unloosed torrent of her hair. When I do an image-search for The Woman With the Alabaster Jar, I see both gestures. In one such, she stands behind an unsuspecting Jesus who is reclining at table, her jar, bauble-sized, poised in her outstretched hands as though to drop it. In another, she is prostrate at his feet, her long tresses caressing his foot while he rests his hand lightly on her head.

The Source

To sort out my confusion – about how the same event is described variously in the course of Kassia’s Hymn and from there into Orthodox Liturgy – I reason that her source for the story of The Woman With the Alabaster Jar is in one or another of the Gospels that narrate the incidents of Jesus’s ministry. (The term “Gospel” comes from the Anglo-Saxon “god-spell,” which translates from the Greek word euangelion, meaning “good news.”) In fact she is in all four, Mark, Matthew, Luke and John.

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In Matthew and Mark, in the town of Bethany, she has arrived at the home of Simon, a leper, bearing an alabaster jar of “very costly” fragrant oil. She is unnamed. Jesus is reclining at the dinner table when – one does wonder how she managed to crash this party – she “broke the jar and poured it over his head,” speechless all the while. Mark and Matthew are almost identical in their account of what happened next. Jesus’s disciples, who are among the dinner guests, exclaim indignation at this display of extravagance. “Why this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for a large sum” – 300 denarii or a year’s wages – “and given to the poor.”

Jesus is having none of it. And here I imagine the woman standing speechless as ever, empty alabaster phial dangling from her fingers, perhaps drawing her stole over her head as the men loudly harrumph and imprecate. Jesus, forehead and cheeks slicked with oily myrrh that he doesn’t bother to wipe away, bids them to shut up. “Why do you subject the woman to abuse?”  Then, in a phrase – a remonstration – that comes down to us through millennia, he explains why he accepts her precious gift. “She has done me a beautiful deed; for you always have the destitute with you, and you can do good to them whenever you wish [my ital], but you do not always have me.”

Anticipating his own Passion on the cross, he accepts the anointing as the woman’s foreshadowing of his laying-out for burial. “Truly I say to you, wherever these good tidings are proclaimed, in the whole world, what this woman did will also be told, as a memorial to her.”

 And immediately the scene ends.

Note that she-of-no-name is not once spoken of as a “sinner,” much less a “prostitute,” not even by the male disciples, who have now been silenced for eternity while we remember her still.

But in a clue to what will become of her, a footnote to Matthew in the Geneva Bible published 1599, calls her a “sinful woman.” And so she had proven to be, in Luke. In the New King James Version (as in the Orthodox Study Bible), “behold a woman in the city who was a sinner,” entered the house of Simon, a Pharisee (not a leper) who had invited Jesus to dinner. The woman-who-was-a-sinner stood behind the reclining Jesus and wept, and “she kissed His feet and anointed them with the fragrant oil” she had brought in an alabaster flask.

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This gesture infuriates the male host. Simon murmurs sotto voce that if this Man were truly a prophet, He would know “what manner of woman this is,” a prostitute, her hair flagrantly unloosened, her kisses and tears in possession of His feet. Now comes one of the most noble rejoinders in Christian Scripture to misogynist shaming: “Simon, I have something to say to you.” “Teacher, say it.” “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave Me no water for My feet, but she has washed My feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head. ⁴⁵ You gave Me no kiss, but this woman has not ceased to kiss My feet since the time I came in. ⁴⁶ You did not anoint My head with oil, but this woman has anointed My feet with fragrant oil. ⁴⁷ Therefore I say to you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much.”

Perhaps Jesus then holds out his hands and helps the woman up from her knees. What even does a multitude of sins measure compared to love? “Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.”

And here we leave her, shriven of sin, until she shows up again in John.

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Once again we are in Bethany, this time in the home of Mary, Martha and their brother Lazarus, he “whom Jesus had raised from the dead.” And we are at dinner as usual, with Martha serving, and once again a woman, this time identified as Mary of Bethany, that is, Martha’s and Lazarus’s sister, provides “very costly perfume of pure nard: (aromatic balsam) with which she anoints Jesus’s feet and wipes them dry with her hair “and the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.” So: no tears, no multitudinous sins or repentance nor even any salvation proffered.

But there is the male spoil-sport, named as Judas Iscariot, he who would betray Jesus with a treacherous kiss. Judas in charge of the disciples’ money-box from which he pilfers denarii for himself. Judas, who loudly signals his virtue. “Why was that perfume not sold for 300 denarii and given to poor people?” Unimpressed by this line of argument – “for you always have the poor with you” – Jesus takes Mary’s part. “Let her alone; she has kept this for the day of My burial.”

And so all the way down to the ninth century we are back where I left Kassia:: “O misery of Judas! He saw the harlot kiss Thy feet, and deceitfully he plotted to betray Thee with a kiss. She loosed her hair and he was bound a prisoner by fury, bearing in place of myrrh the stink of evil: for envy knows not how to choose its own advantage. O misery of Judas! From this deliver our souls, O God!”

In only one of the four Gospel appearances of The Woman With the Alabaster Jar is she described as “sinful” (the implication is that the sin is of a sexual nature) and in that version she is also described by Jesus himself as one who has loved (Him) much and so she departs in peace. Whence, then, the wretched “harlot” who may as well be dead?

allamericanspeakers.com st clement of alexandria

By the ninth century, of course, the Church’s lurid preaching of this story had been long-encoded, including in its Liturgical treasures such as the Hymn of Kassia: “How can I look upon Thee, O Master? Yet Thou hast come to save the harlot.” The Woman in her scandalous fleshiness, her stink and wanton kisses and lewd exhibition of her hair – why, her very gender has condemned her. “[For women] the very consciousness of their own nature must evoke feelings of shame.” Saint Clement of Alexandria, Christian theologian (c150-215).

We are told (in Wikipedia) that Kassia’s Hymn, chanted only once a year, is so popular with sex workers in Greece that, while they are otherwise not often seen in church, do attend the services of Holy and Great Tuesday. I picture them huddled in the vestibule in exalted shame as the Church thunders at them: “And do you not know that you are Eve? God’s sentence hangs still over all your sex and His punishment weighs down upon you. You are the devil’s gateway! […] Because of the death you merited, even the Son of God had to die… Woman, you are the gate to hell!” Tertullian, “the father of Latin Christianity” (c160-225)

What Finally to Make of The Woman With the Alabaster Jar?

In the liner notes to the CD, Kassia, Diane Touliatos writes: “…unlike any of her contemporary male hymnographers, Kassia defended the virtues of fallen and Christian women in a society where women were expected to be obedient and meek. Kassia stands as a pioneer for her writings, musical compositions, and advocacy for women.” I’m not sure that a deeply-inspired compassion for fallen womankind (who will be saved by male agency, Father and Son) amounts to “advocacy” for women’s personhood under patriarchy. But the blogger, Elizabeth Livingston, sees her as very much her own woman in spite of social constrictions. You can see her thus, striding unaccompanied, purposefully, “in her commitment to Jesus,” to wash his feet in a perfumed oil she could ill afford (it “maybe represented her life’s savings”). Love, devotion, sacrifice – the apogee of feminine service as compared to Judas Iscariot’s (masculine?) arrogance, self-righteousness and sheer bone-headedness.

Although the Evangelists put no words in her mouth (unlike Kassia, who gives her hundreds), Livingston voices her as unbothered by what people are saying about her action, oblivious to all but Him: “It’s about diving fully into the sweetness of His presence.” Then Livingston deploys a metaphor: What is that but the “alabaster box of our lives” that we must break open in order that “the praises of our hearts to Him” pour out?

Or perhaps we can bend the story back to a complex “tradition-history,” as feminist theologian Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza hypothesizes, one that precedes the Gospel narratives or was redacted by their writers: it includes the alabaster flask of ointment, the anointing itself, and the Pharisee, Simon.

Or, as my friend and email correspondent, David Holm, suggests: “We have two different women doing the anointing. One is unidentified but is in the same village, Bethany, as Mary, Martha and Lazarus; and the other woman is probably a prostitute who lived somewhere around the southwestern corner of the Sea of Galilee.”

Let’s hold that thought for now – “probably a prostitute” – for in the Western – but not Eastern – Christian tradition the Woman With the Alabaster Jar will become Mary Magdalene, “the original repentant whore.” And the subject of a future blog post.

Finally, I turned to The Very Rev. Archpriest Fr Roman Bozyk, Dean of the Faculty of (Orthodox) Theology of St. Andrew’s College, University of Manitoba, who always, with admirable patience, hears me out on whatever is troubling me as an Orthodox Christian and responds with compassionate clarity. I asked him: “What do you say to us – me – about contradictions in what the Church teaches as Gospel truth, such as the identity of The Woman With the Alabaster Jar?” He answered: “Each Gospel was written at a particular time for a particular audience, and so details will differ accordingly. But Christ’s message is the same throughout.”

And what is that message? I choose this one: “Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.”

Tossed into this anti-Pauline polemic (although not necessarily a feminist issue) was the charge that Paul had deformed the message of the plain-spoken egalitarian Jew from Galilee by institutionalizing the early Christian communities as hierarchical, doctrinaire and, did I mention, misogynist centres of power.

I remember reading selected texts that “proved” the veracity of these charges and my spirit writhed under their abusive assault.

But I moved on, read feminist literature on other topics – wages for housework, Marx and feminism, rape and pornography, race and “difference,” the male gaze, the real meaning of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. And by not attending any longer any church of any denomination, I spared myself the particular torments of instruction in the Epistles of St Paul.

The decades passed. Then in 2001, as a result of my adventure with the Byzantine saint Demetrius (it would eventually produce my book, Prodigal Daughter) I was considering the value of my heritage in the Orthodox Church. I read, for example, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by the Classical historian Charles Freeman. Fellow Classicist Mary Beard summarized his argument in a review in the British paper, The Independent, as that “the authority of the church and its political supporters destroyed ‘the tradition of rational thought’ that was among the major achievements of the classical world.”

Normally, I would have nodded in full agreement with Freeman’s grievance about the anti-intellectualism of “irrational” religious faith, but this time, much to my surprise, I found myself upturned by it. Knowing something now of the Eastern Mind of Byzantium and Orthodoxy and being of some sympathy with it, I needed to be reassured that “faith” and “reason” were not necessarily mutually exclusive. As a writer of nonfiction in particular, I had a simple question to put to a priest/reverend/pastor: Why should I, a writer, whose stock in trade is my brain and a certain degree of  impertinence, succumb to a religious faith that arguably despises my intelligence?

I took that, rather artless, question to a friend of a friend, an Anglican priest in Edmonton, who leaped from his chair to seize a Bible and read to me from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” (Or even better, as I would later read in David Bentley Hart’s translation, “And do not be configured to this age, but be transformed by renewal of the intellect.”) Paul wrote that? I was at once disbelieving and heartened. Later I would come ’round to consider the meaning of the rest of his sentence but at that moment in the chancery of an Anglican church I sat straight upright in the knowledge that the deplorable apostle Paul, in the first decades after the death of Jesus, had reassured me of the value of my “intellect” in the exercise of whatever modicum of Christian faith I might eventually acquire. (Mark 9:24 “I have faith; help my faithlessness.” Hart trans.)

And so began my tutorship in the meaning of the Epistles of St Paul, in the course of which I have nevertheless remained an unshakeable feminist.

I could be accused of having read very selectively about Paul but I plead the necessity of having to make choices among the myriad texts that have been written on the subject. I have bought books as I have come upon them, and some titles and subtitles have jumped out at me as revising my earlier feminist antipathy. Here are some titles in my library: A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity by Daniel Boyarin; First and Second Corinthians: An Orthodox Bible Study by Fr. Lawrence Farley; What Paul Meant by (Catholic and Classicist) Garry Wills; Meeting God in Paul by former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams; Paul: The Mind of the Apostle by English writer and ex-believer A.N. Wilson; The First Paul: Reclaiming the radical visionary behind the Church’s conservative icon by Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan; and Paul: A Very Short Introduction by E.P. Sanders. It was of course important to me that I read women writers and scholars on the subject. A “leading historian of antiquity,” Paula Fredriksen, wrote Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle; St. Paul, the Misunderstood Apostle by English writer and historian of comparative religion Karen Armstrong; and Paul: A Short Introduction by professor of Divinity, Morna D. Hooker. I have a couple of whimsical texts that I keep: written in 1957 by a British writer, H.K. Luce, “St Paul,” as part of a series, Lives to Remember I retrieved from a box of discards ; and, found in a religious goods shop in Thessalonica, St Paul’s Journeys to Greece and Cyprus by a Greek academic, A.J. Delicostopoulos.

And, because she has a lot to say about the Epistles (and was influenced by the  redoubtable feminist theologian, Mary Daly, who was dismissed for refusing to allow men to enroll in her classes at Boston College. ), Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins.

Whew.

Was it Caravaggio’s monumental painting, Conversion of St. Paul, that was the first narrative that I “read” of the journey of Saul, persecutor of Christians, on the road to Damascus to become Paul? If so, it was a disappointment to learn, in Acts 9:3-4, that there was no horse on the road to Damascus but only a mighty flash of light that threw Saul off his feet to lie prostrate on the ground, and a voice from within the light: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He was not so much blinded by the light as simply unable to see anything within its dazzling blaze. Thus, in about the year 33CE, Saul became Paul whom God had”set apart from birth,”  had chosen to reveal his Son to him and “through me in order that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles.” (Gal 1: 16) And so began his extraordinary travels around the Roman world of the eastern Mediterranean – Philippi, Thessalonica, Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, Galatea – to establish or assist communities of fledgling Christians, to encourage, exhort, mediate, and above all to preach to them – and write letters – “the obedience of faith in Christ Jesus.” In his letter to the Galatians,  he rang the changes on the gifts of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness and self-control.” (Gal 5:22) It would prove to be a winning formula in a world of Imperial brutishness and profligacy.

I soon recognized Paul in icons as the balding, brow-furrowed one among the Apostles, said to have been bow-legged and unprepossessing in looks. He was a Greek-speaking urbanite from Tarsus, in the Roman province of Cilicia with the rights of a Roman citizen, and it is in Rome that he disappears from the record, perhaps executed, that is martyred, in a Roman prison.

And so I began to read. Fortuitously, even before I had read the Epistles in the Orthodox Study Bible  (King James Revised), I had picked up Borg’s and Crossan’s The First Paul and learned there are in fact three Pauls: the historical and radical Paul of letters by him; those by the conservative “Paul”, written by faithful followers after his death; and the reactionary, pseudo-Paul, the author(s) of letters  issued a generation or two after Paul in a very different world where Christians were martyred in successive persecutions in the dying days of the pagan Empire. (They would finally cease when Emperor Constantine issued an edict of toleration in 313 CE.) And then there are the obvious-to-scholars interpolated fragments of text, including those notorious teachings that we feminists cited as “evidence” of Paul’s misogyny. According to David Bentley Hart in a note about his translation of the New Testament, “the best critical scholarship regards [these] as a later and rather maladroit interpolation…almost certainly spurious.”

Well, then: fortified by this rather sensational information (I already felt like a cat that had been set among the pigeons) I was ready to read the Letters/Epistles themselves. I knew that, although the authorized Bible made no distinction among the letters as to authorship (they are all “by Paul”), I was now informed that there was only one authentic Paul and this is the one I would spend most time with.

Дзвони дзвонять бам-бам-бам, Чи до школи, чи до церкви, час-час-час…The bells are ringing, ding-dang-dong, To school or to church, it’s time-time-time.

I knew how to make the sounds of each letter (Ukrainian vowels,unlike the Russian, are pronounced without variation) and I knew there were “false friends” that lurked among them: В was not “b” but “v” and Н was not “h” but “n.” But what I revelled in were the letters that arrived from another calligraphic imagination altogether. Д or “d,” Я, not a backwards R but “Ya,” Б or “b.” Further on into the Cyrillic ABCs (in Ukrainian there are 32 letters), I relished the shaping of Ш or “sh,” Щ or “shch as in fresh cheese,” Ч or “ch,” Ц or “ts,” and, most fun of all, Ж, or “zh.”

See, you can read Cyrillic too.

The fact that in Ukrainian you needed only one letter where in English – or, God help us, Polish – you needed at least two in Latin letters to make the same sound (Щ = szcz in Polish) eventually confirmed for me the wisdom of the ancestors in choosing such an efficient representation of the sounds of most Slavic speech. As a result I can read – but not necessarily understand – Russian, Belarusian, Serbian, Macedonian, Montenegrin and Bulgarian. This is handy for figuring out newspaper headlines or street names or where a bus is going. Or, in a museum cafe in Sofia, I read that the “vegetarian menu” is offered in Bulgarian as “Lenten.”

I loved drawing the letters, curlicues and whorls and slanted strokes in the cursive, long before the letters arranged themselves into discrete sound clusters and then words. So for me the written Ukrainian language was first a design, such as one could trace on an embroidered cushion. Pleasing, like the swirl of my own name written on the flyleaf of the Reader on mum’s lap: Мирося Косташ. I don’t think I thought of these letters as exotic. Private, yes, belonging to this homely place in the pool of light under the lampshade or, later, belonging to the church, including its basement (Saturday and Sunday schools) where none but hyphenated-Canadians would gather to study on weekends. Even before I could read them, I had seen the letters all my life, again in that private space of my father’s newspaper from Winnipeg, Український Голос or “Ukrainian Voice” and on the fragile airmail letters that came all the way from relatives in Джурів, Dzhuriv, in the УРСР, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. And in a crabbed kind of cuneiform (to my childish eye) on the icons in the church.

And when I went to Greece the first time, I discovered I could read that too, or make a stab at it: shop signs, bus stations, icons. Once I had sounded out the letters (and thanks also to all those “Greeks” i.e. fraternities at the university with their  ΦΔΚ and ΣΑΜ emblazoned above their porches), I was already a foot in the door of Greek script. Γ = Г, Δ = Д, Φ = Ф, Λ = Л, Π = П….easy-peasy.

(In this respect, at least, I was not as naive as the American writer, Mary Norris, who wrote recently in the New Yorker “on the pleasures of a different alphabet,” the Greek in her case. “It had never occurred to me,” she writes, “that a person could become literate in a language that was written in a different alphabet.” I do admit that I am transfixed by the obvious literacy of a person reading right to left in the pages of an Arabic book or in vertical columns of Mandarin.)

And when I went to church in Greece, I had a field day: Ecclesia! Theotokos! Episkop! Liturgia! Khristos! And then learned the exact same vocabulary in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Just so, we Ukrainian-Canadian Orthodox are instructed to refer, in English, to an eparchy (Greek) and not to a diocese (Latin), to Divine Liturgy (Liturgia), not Mass, to the Mother of God (Theotokos) rather than to the Virgin Mary. This is no mere whimsy: our Orthodox Christianity is the fruit of missions among the Slavs of emissaries from Greek-speaking Constantinople, not Latin Rome. So when the need arose for a vocabulary of Christian terms and concepts that had no Slavonic equivalent, Greek was adopted holus-bolus. For example, the names of the priest’s vestments in English: Phelonion (robe),  Epitrahilion (stole), and Epimanikia (cuffs). Or translated into tormented (to me, trying to memorize the Creed, for instance) neologisms for ” Who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified” come up with five- and seven-syllabic words. 

I could read these words, i.e. sound them out, in my Children’s Prayer Book but, until the Church decided to publish bilingual editions of the Liturgical books we used, I hadn’t the foggiest idea what a lot of the words meant. Rivnopokloniaiemyi, anyone? I memorized The Nicene Creed as a child, one ghastly sound group after another, but I had no idea what I was professing “to believe” until I read the English text. (Whether I then “believed,” is another issue.)

According to Mary Norris, “the English alphabet is descended, via the Latin, from the Greek alphabet, which, according to Herodotus, was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet. Well, that’s interesting:  that all those languages written in Latin letters (Czech, English, Turkish) should have the same root as Cyrillic letters? It seems I have been labouring under the illusion of the utter strangeness of the one to the other. And for this I account the story of how the Cyrillic alphabet came to be.

If you, dear Reader, have ever paused to wonder why this particular European alphabet is called “Cyrillic,” you could logically assume that it is attributed to the divine work of St Cyril (“Apostle to the Slavs” together with his brother, St Methodius) of whom you will have heard in order even to pose the question. They were 8th century monks and theologians from Thessalonica in northern Greece who were sent by the Byzantine emperor, Michael III in Constantinople, on a mission to Slavic Great Moravia, at the request of Prince Rastislav. The Prince requested translations of Scripture and Psalters into Slavonic and an alphabet in which to do so. The first attempt at the alphabet was not in fact Cyrillic but Glagolitic (it looks like this: Ⰳⰾⰰⰳⱁⰾⰹⱌⰰ) and nothing came of it. Rastislav’s successor did not support their work and the Slavonic Liturgy was briefly deemed heretical.

But all was not lost. Although the disciples of Cyril and Methodius were expelled from Moravia, they were welcomed by Boris, ruler of the First Bulgarian Empire, who gave them a scriptorium in Ohrid (Macedonia in former Yugoslavia) in which to work out a new, improved alphabet that would be called the Cyrillic in honour of their masters. And this one stuck. According to Wikipedia, Cyrillic is derived from the Greek capital letters script, augmented by letters from the older Glagolitic alphabet, including additional letters  for Old Slavonic sounds not found in Greek. There you have it. From Ohrid to Kyiv to…Edmonton.

Imagine,then, my aggrieved astonishment, on a visit to Venice, to hear a British travel guide address his group waiting to enter St Mark’s Basilica: “Strange as it may seem, you will see Greek in this Christian church.” Note to tour guides: San Marco is known architecturally as an example of eleventh-century Italo-Byzantine style and the mosaics in the main porch are in “a fairly pure Byzantine style.” In fact, to quote the official website of the Basilica, “essentially Byzantine in its architecture, the Basilica finds in the mosaics its natural integrating element.” And that’s where you will read that troublesome Greek.

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.