Next Christmas promises to be historic in Ukraine. For the first time, most Orthodox Christians in the country will celebrate the birth of Christ on December 25, instead of January 7. Last year parishes were given the freedom to follow the revised Julian calendar, aligned with the Gregorian, to show their repudiation of the Russian invasion and many congregations did so. From September 1 this will be the norm.
This has been agreed by the synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which on Wednesday formally adopted the so-called revised Julian calendar to mark distances with the Russian Church, which continues to use the original. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine was the final push to take a step that had been debated internally for some time. “It is the decision that the majority of the faithful of our Church and the majority of Ukrainian society expected from us,” said Metropolitan Epiphany, head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, in a statement explaining that the parishes who wish may continue to use the old Julian calendar, if that is what the majority of their faithful want.
In fact, in an interview the metropolitan archbishop of Kyiv and spokesman for the country’s Orthodox Church, Ievstrati Zoria, explains that for Ukrainians the question of the calendar “has always been, not a question of dates, but of national identity” . They clung to it in the 16th century when Ukraine was part of the Polish confederation and the Catholic state tried to force all Orthodox Christians to adopt the Gregorian calendar decided by Pope Gregory XIII in Rome in 1582, and they returned to do it in the 20th century, when “staying faithful to the Julian calendar was a form of mild resistance to Bolshevik oppression”. This time, however, in order to defend their national identity, the Ukrainian Orthodox have come to the conclusion that what they must do is the opposite: leave behind this almanac that binds them to Moscow and add to the revised version, the one followed by the western churches for their holy days.
“Now most of Ukrainian society, including believers, feel that calendar unity with Russia is a form of subordination to Russia and Russian culture,” says the spokesman of the Kyiv Patriarchate, for which the war has made it clear that the Russian Orthodox Church is nothing more than “an agency of the Kremlin”, part of its propaganda machinery. The social attitude towards the calendar, he continues, is the same as that which many Ukrainians now feel in relation to the Russian language. Although it is his first language, he has stopped using it in favor of Ukrainian following the invasion, he explains in English. “The USSR tried to erase the Ukrainian language. Now I understand that if I use the Russian language to speak about public affairs, Vladimir Putin and his entourage will think that if we Ukrainians speak Russian, follow the Russian calendar and Russian culture, we cannot be anything but Russian. For this reason, our decision to change the calendar is part of our resistance to aggression”.
Currently, all national Orthodox churches that support the independence of the Kyiv Patriarchate from Moscow, recognized in 2019, already follow the revised Julian calendar (Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Albania) while those that oppose it (Russia, Georgia, Serbia, Poland and Jerusalem) have remained faithful to the old. “I think it’s clear who we should be with”, states Zoria. They cannot compel anyone, but he calls on “all Ukrainian Orthodox to join this reform,” including those who have remained faithful to the Russian Orthodox Church. Its simple existence within Ukraine “is an anomaly”, insists the archbishop, since in this branch of Christianity the tradition is that the borders of the churches coincide with the policies and there is only one per country, with management autonomy. “The Russians do not recognize that Ukrainians have their own national identity and believe that we are simply a part of the great Russian nation,” he says at the Saint Michael’s Monastery of the Golden Domes. The arrival of the coffin of a soldier who fell in combat serves as a brutal reminder of the tactics that Putin is willing to use to assert his imperialist ideology.
