Orthodox Pilgrimage in Eastern Europe: An Introduction

Pilgrimage, the focus of this special issue, has been much studied—as both practice and concept—by scholars working with disciplines and definitions largely shaped by Western Christian models.¹ Amid the wealth of literature on Christian pilgrimage in Europe, works on Greek Orthodox pilgrimage in particular have challenged assumptions about the nature of pilgrimage as centered on walking, or at least travel (reflecting the Latin peregrinatio), rather than veneration (proskynēa). ² Research on Orthodoxy in Eastern Europe, however, remains comparatively marginal both in terms of quantity and influence—although Jeanne Kormina’s work, as several articles in this special issue demonstrate, has contributed notably to the Anglophone conversation. In part this is because, as Father Dragos Herescu observes, too few of these studies have been translated into English.³ Prominent scholarship on pilgrimage in the region has also focused on Russian Orthodox pilgrimage practices, with several influential studies examining the startling growth of this phenomenon in the post-Soviet period.⁴ The articles in this special issue focus on pilgrimage in Armenia, Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania and in so doing allow for comparative perspectives on Orthodox pilgrimage.

Bringing together theological and anthropological perspectives on Orthodox pilgrimage in Eastern Europe adds further nuance to the field, rather than implying a homogeneous “Orthodox pilgrimage” which might be held up against a homogeneous Roman Catholic or Protestant pilgrimage. The varieties of pilgrimage are perhaps best conceived as kaleidoscopic combinations of people, places, rituals, texts, and—key to this special issue—objects. As part of “lived religion,” by which we mean religion as it is experienced, expressed, and conceived by individuals in their daily lives,⁵ pilgrimage is ever dynamic and diverse. Studying it brings texture to our picture of lived Christianity, and greater understanding of the ways individuals seek out the sacred in communities which experienced—to varying degrees—a concerted effort to rupture religious tradition. In important ways, however, pilgrimage also provides a lens that allows us to move beyond a focus on the individual. Pilgrimages have “come to dominate public religious patterns of engagement” in Romania and other parts of Eastern Europe, according to Herescu. They thus have the potential to shape, as well as reveal, the dynamic relationships between churches and wider society, and relationships within churches—with churches here (and for the most part, throughout this special issue) conceived as communities rather than ecclesiastical structures.⁶

In the region examined here, scholars showed limited interest in religion and spirituality in Russia and Eastern Europe before the collapse of Soviet-style state socialism in 1989/1991. As Magdalena Lubanska observes in her contribution to this special issue, the ideological constraints on academic inquiry meant that lived Christianity could not be seriously studied by Bulgarian scholars during the communist era. Instead, religious beliefs and practices were blithely attributed to pre-Christian traditions.⁷ In the past three decades, the burgeoning interest in the subject has begun to plug significant gaps in our knowledge, particularly of lived religion. These countries are bound by the shared twentieth-century experience of state socialism, more long-lived in Armenia, which became part of the Soviet Union in 1922, than in Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania, which came under the Kremlin’s sphere of influence after World War II. The contributors differ in the importance they attribute to the influence of the communist past on contemporary pilgrimage practices. Lubanska, for example, explicitly rejects it as the primary influence on her subjects, arguing that much earlier historical and cultural processes predominantly shape Bulgarian attitudes to healing fabrics and pilgrim practices. In contrast, Konrad Siekierski argues that the way pilgrims treat the Gospel books in the Matenadaran (a flagship museum in Armenia) has been partly shaped by “Soviet legacies of desecration, museumification, and heritagization of religion.”⁸ In her examination of pilgrimage sites in Subcarpathia, Iuliia Buyskykh notes that communist-era population shifts and the post-World War II relocation of state boundaries uprooted Greek Catholics and Orthodox Ukrainians. In her observations, these religious communities “tend to re-root through pilgrimages.”⁹

It is a truism that the communist...