Placeholder when loading item promotions
BUCHA, Ukraine — As they waited for the archpriest to bless their food baskets with his brush soaked in holy water, locals struck up a conversation about things only they could understand. Perhaps in years past they would have exchanged recipes for their traditional holiday cakes. This Sunday they shared horror stories about their time under Russian occupation.
The residents of Bucha stood in front of a white church with a golden dome. The site had become the site of a mass grave for their neighbors.
“I come here every Easter, but this year especially. Because I’ve lived They shot me,” Tatiana said. Then she started crying, unable to say more.
This Orthodox Easter – usually a colorful occasion of icing cakes and painted eggs – was a somber but defiant one in Ukraine. It was the 60th day of a bloody war.
Perhaps no place in Ukraine symbolizes the country’s suffering more than Bucha, a town about 30 minutes outside of Kyiv where Russian soldiers tortured and killed hundreds of residents. But streets littered with Ukrainian corpses and wrecked Russian military equipment were clean Sunday morning. People who had to leave their partially destroyed houses returned.
The Church of St. Andrew and All Saints of Pyervozvannoho in Bucha, which had been converted into a burial ground, welcomed guests from the same area.
The Easter service was an act of resilience and a time to meet with a community that understands how impossible it feels to return to normal. In his sermon, Archpriest Andriy Galavin condemned the actions of Russian soldiers and called on the faithful “not to become evil when fighting evil”.
He smiled as he walked through a line of people in front of the church with their baskets on the floor in front of them. He blessed everyone by sprinkling water on both the food and the person. Some laughed as the drops spattered their faces.
How Russia’s war in Ukraine is dividing the orthodox Christian world
For Anna Podolyanko, the day was bittersweet. It was the first time she saw her father Viktor, a resident of Bucha, since Russian forces withdrew from the city three weeks ago. She had never visited St. Andrew’s before, but it felt like an appropriate place to spend the holidays with her family. After dozens of bodies were exhumed nearby, the Easter service here was a reminder of what was lost and also a demonstration of survival.
“I wanted to hug my father and I wanted to cry,” Podolianko said.
A day normally set aside for celebration was overshadowed by anger and loss. In Odessa, a strategic Black Sea port, at least eight people, including a 3-month-old boy, were killed and 18 injured in rocket attacks on Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said, before adding in disgust: “What a great Easter holiday we are. re have.” Zelenskyy described Russian soldiers as “scumbags”.
Some cities imposed an earlier curfew for the weekend amid concerns that civilian areas could be targeted by Russian military forces during the celebrations.
In his Easter message, Metropolitan Epiphanius, the head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, said: “Despite the sanctity of Holy Week and the resurrection of Christ for all Christians, the Russian troops not only did not stop their crimes, but, as if inspired by Satan himself, increased them Bloodshed.
“During Lent, Russia, which considers itself the stronghold of true Christianity, razed our towns and villages, killing innocent people and destroying everything it could,” he added.
In Chernihiv – a town near Ukraine’s border with Belarus where more than 700 people, both military and civilians, were killed in the Russian invasion, according to local officials – hundreds of worshipers attended the church of the 307-year-old St Catherine structure crowned with five golden domes.
Yurii and Taisia, a local couple who declined to give their last names for security reasons, said they left their own Russian Orthodox Church at the start of the war and decided never to return after seeing images of Russian violence against them civilians had seen. They grew up speaking a mixture of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian, but after the large-scale invasion of Moscow they learned to speak only Ukrainian.
“We used to be indifferent because we thought God was for everyone,” Taisia said. “But we changed our mind after seeing the atrocities committed by the Russians.”
Tensions between the Russian wing of the Orthodox Church, with its pro-Kremlin patriarch, and Orthodox leaders in Ukraine preceded this war. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is “self-governing” but remains under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate. This is separate from the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which is three years old and was formed as a direct result of the burgeoning movement to break away from the Russian Orthodox Church and create a purely independent ecclesiastical entity for Ukraine.
Evstratiy Zoria, the Ukrainian Orthodox Archbishop of Chernihiv and Nizhyn, said in an interview that “what has happened to Russian Orthodoxy over the past three decades is the fruit of propaganda — the idea that Russia is something bigger than the state that Ukraine really doesn’t exist and is just a part of the great ‘Russian world’.”
Zoria hopes that the Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox Churches can coexist in Ukraine as long as they agree to reject the Russian Federation’s territorial ambitions.
“Anyone who has understood that the ‘Russian world’ is a lie needs to share their knowledge with other community members,” Zoria said, “and I believe that we can slowly spread this understanding and we can have a peaceful, fruitful and genuine unity will have without compulsion. We are a democratic country.”
In Irpin, a Kyiv suburb where some of the heaviest fighting between Ukrainian and Russian soldiers took place, Archpriest Volodymyr Molnar’s damaged church had few visitors on Sunday morning.
“If you wanted to see a lot of people, you should have come last year,” he said in an interview.
His church was the first thing many evacuees saw as they cautiously walked around the ruins of a bridge that Ukrainian forces were destroying to halt the Russian military’s advance into Kyiv. Many were dehydrated and had gone days without eating. For some people fleeing the fighting in the city, the basement of a small wooden chapel on the property became a haven for the night – before fleeing further afield in the morning.
Molnar built everything themselves three years ago. When he had to evacuate to a neighbor’s house, he said leaving the church felt like abandoning a child. When he came back, the window glass was shattered. Walls that were bright white in color have smoke stains and holes from shrapnel. The house on the property where he lived with his wife and three children was reduced to rubble.
The chapel, which had served as a temporary shelter, caught fire after being hit by artillery and burned to the ground.
“We will survive,” Molnar said. “Somehow we will pick up and live our lives again. Right now it is important to have peace.”
Klemko reported from Chernihiv, Ukraine. Serhii Korolchuk in Chernihiv and Erin Cunningham in Washington contributed to this report.