Village
Priests’ Reports on Religious Practices of the Peasantry (1853)
“Peasant
Rituals,” trans. Carol Apollonio Flath, in Russian Women, 1698-1917: Experience
and Expression, an Anthology of Sources, ed. Robin Bisha, Jehanne Gheith,
Christine Holden, and William Wagner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2002), 236-41. Used by permission of Indiana University Press. Some explanatory
notes draw from notes in this edition.
Here a parish priest describes what
he considers remnants of pagan practices in his parish—practices he dismisses
as superstition.
When a village is threatened with
an epidemic (for example, the recent cholera), several old maids—elderly,
unmarried women known for their Christian way of life—will meet at night and
walk together in a circle around the village, carrying an icon and lighted
candles in their hands and singing religious songs. (Bryn Geffert and Theofanis
G. Stavrou, Eastern Orthodox Christianity: The Essential Texts [New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2016], 325)
Further Reading
Answering Fundamentalist Protestants and Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox on Images/Icons
