Ukrainian Peasants - Religion and Expressive Culture



Religious Beliefs and Practices. Ukraine is nominally atheist. Ukrainian Orthodoxy was traditionally the religion of the eastern portion of the country and Uniate Catholicism was the religion of the west. The current political situation has fostered a great upsurge of religious feeling. Interestingly, whereas Orthodoxy was identified with independence at the time of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Uniate Catholicism is serving that function now. Because Russia is Orthodox and the Orthodox church is the one legally sanctioned for Ukraine, expressions of nationalist feeling have centered around efforts to reestablish the legal standing of the Uniate Church.

The most important religious holiday is Easter, followed by Christmas. A rich and highly developed system of pagan belief has survived and partially blended with Christianity. Some of its most interesting manifestations are Christmastime mumming (Malanka) and fortune-telling; ceremonial treatment of sheafs of grain throughout the year; and summertime rites around Trinity Sunday (Zelene Sviata) and the feast of Saint John the Baptist (Ivan Kupalo), which include the honoring of vegetation by bringing it into the house, fire magic, and the sacrifice of a doll or decorated tree. These rites survived into the present in part because of Soviet encouragement of the pagan aspect of calendary rites as a substitute for Christian festivities and in part because of nationalist attempts to revive things considered indigenously Ukrainian. One manifestation of this revival was the celebration of the first public Malanka in Lwiw for New Year 1988.

The Ukrainian peasant believed in a whole pantheon of spirits: those of the forest, of field and stream, and of the various buildings of the farmstead (the house, the barn, the bathhouse). Often referred to as demons, these are actually helpful spirits that were relegated to the realm of the "unclean force" after the introduction of Christianity. One of the most interesting of the spirits is the mermaid, rusalka or mavka, a female being, usually the spirit of a drowned maiden, who, although dangerous, is said to bring moisture to the fields and to ensure crop fertility. The rusalka may well be a remnant of early matrifocal beliefs.

The primary religious practitioner is the village priest. In the case of the various spirits, however, safe contact is made by women, usually those in a liminal position; a man's seeing a spirit is an omen of misfortune or impending death.

Arts. Besides the rich tradition of embroidery and other tactile arts, Ukrainian culture has a highly developed tradition of oral literature. Folktales, folk songs, folk drama, proverbs, riddles, and numerous other genres have been extensively collected since the nineteenth century. Of special note is the Ukrainian epic tradition, dumy, and the professional performers who sang epic, along with other genres, the kobzari and lirnyky. These performers were blind mendicants organized into semireligious professional guilds.

Medicine. Current medical practices are a combination of the traditional and the modern. Babies are still routinely swaddled. Herbal medicine is very widely practiced, both to prevent illness and to cure ailments. Knowledge of the substances to use for common illnesses is virtually universal. More specialized knowledge of herbs is in the hands of znakhari , learned women and men.

Death and Afterlife. With remnants of the cult of ancestors being as widespread as they are, death was not viewed as a tragedy, but a natural process; the deceased was seen as leaving on a journey to the world of the dead and provided accordingly with food and coins. People who died in old age were dressed in their wedding clothes or a shroud. Those who died young, before they had a chance to marry, were dressed as for a wedding, supplied with a wedding ring, and had their funerals celebrated as wedding rites. Laments were sung over all who died by female members of the family or by professional mourners.

The dead are believed to continue to live on after death, but in a different state and a different place. There is confusion as to the location of the land of the dead. Pre-Christian beliefs had the dead living under the earth, affecting the crops. Christianity places the kingdom of the righteous dead in heaven. Certainly the realm of the dead is forty days away, both because a major commemorative service is held forty days after death and because of the importance of the number forty in both life-cycle and yearly-cycle ritual. There are indications of a belief in an assigned time on earth because those who die young, especially those who die violently (by human hands) are believed doomed to be unquiet dead, forced to remain on earth until their allotted time is expired.

User Contributions:

1
Phillip Margulies
Joseph Roth, in the 1920s, saw many religious images placed by peasants in Galicia (probably in what is now Ukraine)--along with roadside shrines there were also images of saints, placed on the roadside or perhaps in the fields, maybe just for piety, or maybe with some magical purpose like protection from the evil eye. He mentions them in a collection of articles called "The Hotel Years." He doesn't describe them in detail, and I wonder what they looked like. Anybody know?

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