History of Christianity in Ukraine

Andrew the apostle is believed to have travelled up the western shores of the Black Sea, to the area of present-day southern Ukraine, while preaching in the lands of Scythia.

Legend (recorded in the Radziwiłł Chronicle) has it that he travelled further still, up the Dnieper River, until he came to the location of present-day Kiev in AD 55, where he erected a cross and prophesied the foundation of a great Christian city.

[2] Both the 18th-century Church of St Andrew and an earlier structure from 1086 it replaced were purportedly built on the very location of the apostle's cross, planted on a hill overlooking the city of Kiev.

In response to local disputes with clerics of the Latin Church, Cyril and Methodius appealed in person to the Bishop of Rome in 867, bringing with them the relics of Pope Martin from Chersonesos.

Princess Olga of Kiev shortly after her baptism appealed to the Holy Roman emperor Otto the Great to send missionaries into Kievan Rus.

Following the Great Schism in 1054, the Kievan Rus that incorporated some of the modern Ukraine ended up on the Eastern Orthodox Byzantine side of the divided Christian world.

[6] The eastward spread of the Union of Brest led to violent clashes, for example, assassination of the Greek Catholic Archbishop Josaphat Kuntsevych by the Orthodox mob in Vitebsk in 1623.

During this time metropolitan Mogila took full advantage of the moment to restore the Orthodox domination in Ukraine, including returning one of its sacred buildings, the Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kiev.

The transfer itself, however, led to the significant Ukrainian domination of the Russian Orthodox Church, which continued well into the 18th century, Feofan Prokopovich, Epifany Slavinetsky, Stephen Yavorsky and Demetrius of Rostov being among the most notable representatives of this trend.

Although some, particularly in Podolia, chose to revert to Orthodoxy soon after, this in many cases was an exception rather than trend and in locations where the Unia already gave deep roots into the population all of the church property remained in the Catholic and Uniate authority.

Although the idea was shared by growing number of the lower priests, the ruling Uniate synod, controlled by the strong Polish influence, rejected all Semashko's suggestions.

[citation needed] In 1831, the general discontent of the Poles with the Russian rule erupted into a revolt, now known as the November Uprising, which the Uniate Church officially supported.

After regaining the lost territories with the counterattack in late 1914, the Austrian authorities responded with repressions: several thousand Orthodox and Russophilic people died while being interred at a Talerhof concentration camp for those deemed disloyal to Austria.

Therefore, the clergy "ordained" its own hierarchy itself, a practice questionable under the canon law, in the "Alexandrian" manner - by laying on priests' hands on two senior candidates who became known as Metropolitan Vasyl (Lypkivsky) and Archbishop Nestor (Sharayivsky) (reportedly the relics of Clement of Rome who died in Ukraine in the 1st century were also used).

The 1921 Peace of Riga treaty that ended the Polish-Soviet War gave the significant areas of the ethnically Ukrainian (and Belarusian) territories to the reborn Polish state.

In 1924, following a visit with the Ukrainian Catholic believers in North America and western Europe, the head of the UGCC was initially denied reentry to Lviv until after a considerable delay.

[21] Such actions were condemned by the head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, who claimed that these acts would "destroy in the souls of our non-united Orthodox brothers the very thought of any possibility of reunion.

Even before the first world war already quite a lot of distant mountain communities were de facto Orthodox, where priests simply ceased to follow the Uniate canons.

Some believers refused to accept liquidation of their churches and for nearly 40 years the UAOC and UGCC existed in Western Ukraine underground led by the clergy members under the threat of prosecution by the Soviet state.

The relatively permissive post-war government attitude towards the Orthodox Church came to an end with Khrushchev's "Thaw" programme, which included closing the recently opened Kiev's Caves Lavra.

The Moscow Patriarchate also relaxed its canons on the clergy, especially those from the former-uniate territories, allowing them, for example to shave beards (a very uncommon Orthodox practice) and conduct eulogy in Ukrainian instead of Church Slavonic.

As UGCC survived in diaspora and in the underground they took their chance and were immediately revived in Ukraine, where in the wake of general liberalization of the Soviet policies in the late-1980s the activization of Ukrainian national political movements was also prompted.

It is now believed that the only real event which helped to contain the growing schism in the former-uniate territories was the ROC's reaction of raising its Ukrainian Exarchate to the status of an autonomous church, which took place in 1990, and up until the break up of the USSR in late 1991 there was an uneasy peace in western Ukraine.

The lack of parishes in eastern and southern Ukraine prompted President Kravchuk to intervene and to force buildings still closed from the Communist era to re-open under the UOC-KP's ownership.

After Yushchenko's victory, the UOC (MP) criticised him for what they see as support of the "uncanonical organisations", such as his celebrating Orthodox Christmas in St Volodymyr's Cathedral (owned by UOC-KP).

[53] The main religious groups are presented below: Abbreviated as the OCU, the church was established by a unification council on 15 December 2018, and received its tomos of autocephaly (decree of ecclesial independence) by Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople on 5 January 2019.

[55] Independent survey results, however, show significant variance, as many Orthodox Ukrainians do not clearly self-identify with a particular jurisdiction and, sometimes, are even unaware of the affiliation of the church they attend or the existence of the controversy itself.

Also, the geographical factor plays a major role in the number of adherents, as the Ukrainian population tends to be more churchgoing in the western part of the country rather than in the UOC's heartland in southern and eastern Ukraine.

[61] Traditionally the Ukrainian clergy, following the annexation of Kyivan Metropolia, were one of the main sources of opposition to the Old Believer schism which took place at the time, under Patriarch Nikon.

One of the largest religious controversies in Ukraine recently involved having the almost exclusively western Ukraine-based UGCC move its administrative centre from Lviv to Kyiv whilst its new cathedral's construction was sponsored by the first lady, Kateryna Yushchenko-Chumachenko.