Different views
The Great Schism Patrick Tobin looks East again
Fifty years ago, when I was an impetuous teacher of History at St Benedict’s Ealing, I drove six brave Sixth Formers on a 7,000 mile journey to Turkey and Greece. The idea was to follow the route taken by the First Crusade and it took us through what was then Yugoslavia. In Belgrade I asked a young man where we might find Mass. ‘We are Yugoslavs,’ he replied, ‘Wine, women – NO religion!’ We eventually found our Mass - not Roman Catholic but our first experience of the Orthodox ritual – in the fortified monastery of Manasija. A few old women provided the choir but the singing was beautiful. After an hour or so I asked the boys whether they wished to leave. They vigorously shook their heads. Perhaps that was why I then embarked on the writing of a book, examining the impact of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily on the Byzantine Empire, with reference both to the Schism of 1054 between Greek and Latin Christianity and to the Crusades which so woefully deepened that rift, but it was not long before I left St Benedict’s and the teaching of medieval history. Retirement from teaching led to an unexpected broadening of horizons in 2003 when I became Administrator of HMC Projects in Central and Eastern Europe. It was the most wonderful privilege. Until then, my only professional involvement with Eastern Europe had been the offer of a term in my Edinburgh schools to six Bosnian students. Now I ran a scheme which brought hundreds of students to Britain and, together with my wife Margery, I interviewed candidates in capitals across Central and Eastern Europe – in Sarajevo, Sofia, Zagreb, Prague, Tallinn, Chisenau, Podgorica, Warsaw, Bratislava, Bucharest, Kiev, Lviv and Kirovograd. We immediately came to appreciate the difference between working with and enjoying the company of devoted national agents and the superficiality of
Yalta, Alexander Nevsky Cathedral (photo by Stephen Coyne)
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Spring 2019
tourism and, looking back, we think fondly of those years and of the friendships which mean so much to us. Almost without exception our scholars were splendid ambassadors for their countries – intelligent, hard-working, ambitious and adaptable. They willingly engaged with their companions in their new schools, contributed hugely and, more often than not, were offered second years in their courses. And many of them, despite the decades of state-directed atheism thrust onto their countries, were evidently Christian. To the peoples of Eastern Europe, the Twentieth Century brought harsh persecution of the Christian faith. Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Lenin and Stalin imposed on Russia an atheist dictatorship of ‘scientific materialism’. The puppet regimes established across Eastern Europe following the Soviet victory in 1945 also made it their business to repress Christianity. Yet the Church has survived the Soviet epoch in Ukraine, Georgia, Romania, Moldova and Bulgaria, as it had done in Greece, Serbia and Macedonia during the centuries of Ottoman occupation. Everywhere today there is the lovely haunting chant, the beautiful imagery in fresco and mosaic, the timeless ritual. Nowhere has the revival of Orthodoxy been more striking than in Russia itself. In Moscow the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was demolished on Stalin’s orders to make way for a temple to communism, but the German invasion intervened. After the war, Khruschev turned the empty space into a gigantic swimming pool, and yet, in 2005, the Russian government committed to the wholesale restoration of the great basilica, a project completed in 2013 at a cost of £120 billion. Another example may be seen in Yaroslavl, founded in 1010 on the mighty Volga at its confluence with the Kotorosl. The
St Michael’s Monastery, Kiev (photo by Stephen Coyne)
