It was a tough summer for the embattled Russian Orthodox Church.
The story which made international press was the ongoing controversy over the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which split into two factions in 1989. The first ascribes to the Moscow patriarch, a position currently assumed by my namesake Alexy II, a man with close connections to the Kremlin; the second ascribes to the Kyivan Patriarchate, which is trying to gain recognition for the breakaway national church of Ukraine.
The dispute reached spectacle status at the 1020th anniversary of Kyivan Rus, celebrated this past July in the Ukrainian capital. Unpopular president Viktor Yushchenko, who supports the national church, poured kerosene onto the hot coals of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pride with his call for recognition of the church from the Constantinopolitan Patriarch Bartholomew I, who was in attendance alongside Alexy II at the festivities. Yushchenko shockingly snubbed the Russian patriarch at a public ceremony, giving him a business–like handshake shortly after kissing Bartholomew’s hand (hand–kissing being standard fare for Orthodox priests). Alexy II ended up cutting short his trip around Ukraine, as rumors spread in the Russian press of imminent mutual excommunication between the two patriarchs, an act which would have severed relations between the two most prominent figures of Eastern Orthodoxy.
I was in Kyiv a week after the celebrations transpired. Half the city was plastered in posters of Yushchenko and Bartholomew sitting sideby– side in solidarity. In other neighborhoods, streets were lined with portraits of Alexy II under a slogan reading, “Ukraine Supports its Patriarch!” Locals told me that the poster war was the expression of different local powers’ allegiances. They expressed no interest in the controversy, though my tour guide at a monastery was so infused with anti–Russian sentiment that he accused Russia of having perverted Ukraine’s churches with gaudy oriental colors and unharmonious architectural style.
Back in Russia, ultraconservative Bishop Diomid of Chukotka, who calls for the abolition of cell phones, and who accuses the Moscow patriarch of excessive closeness with the Kremlin and excessive contact with foreign religions, created a stir by excommunicating Alexy II, who, needless to say, excommunicated him in retaliation. In Moscow, Diomid’s followers tried to block entrance to mass with a protest at the Christ the Savior Cathedral, and ended up in a street fight with members of Nashi, the progovernment youth group. Diomid continued to lead services in Chukotka for a while, but eventually disappeared to the Siberian wilderness, specifics of his whereabouts unknown, where he continued to polemicize against Alexy and modern decadence via the internet.
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Set into a pit on a side street behind the domineering Olympic Complex, the fairly large Grand Cathedral Mosque feels more like urban underbelly than Moscow grandeur. Unless you sought it out, you’d likely never know of it, except if you were to stand at the nearby market on a Friday afternoon and notice the incredible stream of Central Asian men with rugs tucked under their arms headed to Jumu’uah, the weekly Muslim Sabbath service.
I arrived at the mosque on a Wednesday afternoon to investigate the scene. I was planning to write a story on Moscow’s mosque shortage for a local paper. Four mosques accommodate the city’s two and a half million Muslim population, and I just needed a few locals to register their complaints.
It was all quiet at the mosque. A few men were chatting outside, but I decided to approach a homely man who was alone by the entrance to the mosque, squatting as Europeans never do. I squatted next to him and introduced myself and my aspirations, and began to talk. He looked at me curiously but without responding, which unnerved me. I began asking a series of thoughtless questions, until I paused and waited for his reply, hoping he had discerned some sense in my babble.
“This,” he said, “is a miracle! I just met an American girl on the metro, and we communicated for fifteen minutes. We communicated, but then we got off the escalator, and she just disappeared. I tried to stop her so we could make friends, but she disappeared, but now you’ve come to me. A new friend, another foreigner!”
He waved his hand in a repetitive, gentle motion with every additional phrase.
“My name is Kabulzhan, and I am from Kyrgyzstan,” he went on, showing me his passport, photographs of his family, “and I came to Moscow ten days ago...”
Kabulzhan spoke effusively and at length. He invited me to Kyrgyzstan, and insisted over and over again that our meeting was a miracle. He had come to the mosque hoping for help in finding a job in the city. I kept trying to steer the conversation toward the mosque shortage, but he insisted on discussing faith and friendship. Hamstrings exhausted by the ongoing squat, I suggested we sit in the mosque together, and he led me inside.
There were a couple dozen men inside, praying, sleeping, and chatting. The early evening sunlight which lit the great hall through high windows gave the mosque interior the air of contemplative space.
He compared Islamic and Christian miracles. He told me he believed in both. “We believe in the same God, and the miracle is that our churches and our laws are so different, but our faith is the same.”
When we parted ways, we exchanged phone numbers. At that moment I was filled with an expansive goodwill towards Man, and in particular towards this man.
The following Friday, I returned to the mosque with a photographer to docment the Friday prayer service. It was raining very hard. Rows of men set up rugs in pockets of sheltered space under awnings and in a garage, while those caught in the downpour wrapped themselves in long plastic sheets.
“Alexey!” someone cried out in the hubbub of the after–prayer exodus from mosque grounds. It was Kabulzhan. We started chatting, but I was in a rush and had to bid him goodbye. He called me twice in the following week, but I was too uncomfortable and too busy, the great trump cards of self–centered people, to meet with him again.
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The word namolennoye doesn’t exist in English, not only because we don’t have the grammar, but also because we don’t have the culture for it.Namolennoyeis an adjective (a past passive participle) that usually accompanies the noun mesto., place. Namolennoyemeans “prayed,” where “to pray” is an active verb that effectively takes a direct object (the mesto). So a namolennoye mesto. is a “prayed place,” or, less literally, “a much–prayed–in place.”
I was driving by the Christ the Savior Cathedral with a friend when I first heard the word.
“I don’t like the Christ the Savior Cathedral.”
“Why not?”
“It is not a namolennoye mesto.” The giant cathedral, which glistens over the Moskva River a few minutes’ walk from the Kremlin, was first built in the 19th century, but was demolished by Stalin in 1931 and replaced by a public swimming pool. An exact replica of the cathedral was built after the fall of the Soviet Union, but the church looks, from inside and out, awful shiny.
When Vladimir I of Kyiv chose Eastern Orthodoxy to be the religion of Rus, he cited the beauty of its churches as a primary reason. Much of the service takes place hidden behind the iconostasis. It is conducted in languages that nearly none of the congregation understand, and it embraces worshippers in incense and icon. Long and sensual, it tests the strength of the faithful’s standing muscles, if nothing else. Many Protestants and even Catholics may consider Eastern Orthodox Church culture, with its heavy emphasis on ritual and tradition, as confounding at best and druid at worst. But looking at how Orthodox believers react to more “modernized” religious practices indicates how varied perception of faith can be, even within Christianity. Truth is tied to timelessness and the distant past, not to current events.
I once described Harlem storefront churches to a Muscovite.
“That is not a church!” was the response of my flabbergasted friend.
Above: Painting of a Russian Church.
ALEXI SHAW is a senior majoring in Russian literature and culture. He fears that too much travelling makes one forget that the most important journey takes place on the inside. Of a corporate headquarters