A land of enchantment – and schism

Eastern Europe

I am just back from what was in many ways the trip of a lifetime. I travelled by bus with a group of twenty-five Austrians to visit two former Habsburg cities in southwest Ukraine, namely Czernowitz (Cernivtsi) and Lemberg (Lviv). After journeying to the painted 16th century monasteries of Moldavia, and thence to the one-time German–speaking cities of Czernowitz and war-spared Lemberg, I finished with a few hours spent along the quays of Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany. Over nine days I experienced a series of immersions in Christian culture second to none. At the same time cultural collisions popped up at every turn.

We visited five of the ten soul-stirring painted monastery/churches of Moldavia, all but one of them now a women’s convent. The nuns charge a small admission fee into a rather large walled monastic enclosure, full of grass and rosebushes, in the middle of which sits a glowing church, often with low hills visible beyond. The 16th century churches are painted all over both outside and inside. Several of the buildings offer more than a thousand individual decipherable images, many of them Biblical.

The churches each contain three rooms of about equal size: an outer chamber, a middle burial chamber, and an inner worship space with iconostasis. Inside each church four to six of us would gather to interpret symbolism and to feel the prayer-life of the place. Those church interiors exude holiness! In each, one or two nuns in black habits knelt or crouched staring at the iconostasis. The Christians among us felt humbled and awed. We huddled in front of the icons, gazing deep into the community’s past.

Along roads in the Carpathians, whose peaks are often no higher than those of Gippsland in Eastern Victoria, we encountered maybe seventy or eighty horse-drawn farm-carts each day. No road, not even the busiest, is wider than two lanes. In a Jewish cemetery close the Romanian border with Ukraine, at one of the many locations from which on 25 June 1941 the Nazis invaded Russia, I encountered my first memorial to a Nazi murder of Jews on a given spot. Of course, there are hundreds if not thousands of such memorials further east, but my first encounter with one was, as I had expected, heart-wrenching. Nothing stills the pain. In Lemberg we saw the burnt out shell of a famous synagogue, where among many others Martin Buber had worshipped as a teenager with his uncle. Tears came to my eyes. The prophet of “I and Thou” began life in a stunning city and lived to see its synagogues and worshippers destroyed, yet he never gave up hope.

After two days in Romania we crossed into southwestern Ukraine, where again no road, even the busiest, is wider than two lanes, and the paving is even worse. Our bus jounced every mile of the way in Ukraine. And yet the cities are stunning. Czernowitz has a university installed in a former Orthodox seminary, a huge historicising complex from the later 19th century, with a large Arboretum-like park in the rear. Any university anywhere would be thrilled to own that building. In Ukraine churches abound, all of them recently restored and some of them built only in the past few years. The buildings seem to be Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic (that is, Roman Catholic Uniate) in about equal numbers. One iconostasis in a middle-sized town boasted large pink neon lighting across the top. The intellectuals of Cernowitz are witty. There is a former synagogue which is now a cinema. They call it the Cinemagogue.

Outside of Czernowitz we visited a village of Old Believers (Raskolniki) from the schism of the 1660s. In a scene out of The Brothers Karamazov we stood listening to a young monk tell us why the modern world, including the Orthodox Church, has gone wrong. He explained that it is wrong to cross oneself with three fingers because crossing invokes the Crucifixion and the Holy Trinity was not crucified. Instead, two fingers used by the Old Believers for crossing themselves denote the two natures of the Son, who was indeed crucified, while the three fingers held in the palm symbolise the Trinity that saves us.

On that distinction hinges the schism (Raskol) of the 1660s, from which Dostoevsky took the name of his character Raskolnikov (the “divided one”) in Crime and Punishment (1866). In the autumn sunshine Alyosha Karamazov stood there before us, aged about 28, a kind of unwitting Holy Fool. Briefly he made the Christians among us feel inwardly divided as we wondered what it would be like to see the world in his image of it. The most Tridentine of Catholics seems trendy by comparison. From a low rise we stared across a plain where Tartars had camped, Austrians had drilled, Jews had migrated, and Nazis had marched. This village of weathered wooden houses, quite devoid of man-made colour, offered a time capsule within a larger capsule of the past.

The city of Lemberg (Lviv) is positively magnificent, for it suffered no war damage. The city boasts several square miles of Habsburg-era buildings, some spread over hills, again with lovely tree-filled parks. Churches abound. It is a city to feel proud of, yet nowhere within it could we find any Western newspapers. I came to feel an affinity with the brave souls working to renew it.

The trip ended in Frankfurt-am-Main, where I walked along the river bank past some half dozen museums, many situated in immaculate gardens full of Germans drinking coffee and munching pastry. I had travelled due westward across half of Europe only now to glimpse middle-class culture-lovers at their most comfortable. I felt grateful to have spent time among brave people trying to start new lives for themselves and their countries. Ukraine in its struggle to “modernise” seemed more authentic than Germany, and Europe seemed incomparably larger than ever before. Never before while in Europe have I had so many deeply Christian encounters as in Romania and Ukraine. Part of me will remain with those hopeful people.