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| Lipovan religious celebration |
Swamps had symbolized for as long
as humanity could remember a symbiosis between earth and water, a place that as
the ideal hiding spot for those souls that protested against the oppression and
injustices of the times in which they lived. Somewhere in the shallow waters of
the Danube’s lakes and lagoons a new nation was born, one that was in exile,
far away from its motherland. The self-imposed exile was the only available method
at that time that could guarantee the survival of the Lipovans and their values
which came in conflict with the religious reform from the Russian Church from
that time.
The Lipovans are a Russian group,
also called Old School Orthodox, which claim that they managed to preserve the
original believes and practices of Russian Orthodoxy. Currently they live
scattered in communities, mainly rural, in Romania, Ukraine, and Moldova.
Lipovans managed to secure for themselves a stabile place in the history of
Romania’s Dobrudja region, here they got organized in homogeneous communities
that are eager to preserve the old ways of orthodox worship that
they inherited from their ancestors that fled Russia during the time of the
religious reform. Their culture is centered around the element of water, many
of their traditional tales describing the lives of the fisherman or other
dwellers that have work around the water.
This small group, which lives for
about 300 years in exile, had managed to outline a culture which today stands
apart from that of the Russians from other places. The Lipovans say that they
always settled around water – lakes, lagoons, rives – because the water will
always keep them safe from enemies and will provide food for families.
The Old Believes, term also use to
describe them, left a visible mark in the cultural landscape of Dobrudja, both
in terms of spiritual and material culture. The settlements which still offer
us a good picture regarding the Old Believer’s ancestral way of life are Slava
Cercheză, commune in Tulcea County, and Ghindărești, commune in Constanța
County. This town communes are very
homogeneous in their ethnic structure, the Lipovans representing the dominant
group.
The language of the Old Believers
is distinct from Modern Russian, managing to preserve lexicon segments which
are no longer in used in the standard |Russian from today. An interesting fact
is that this variety was never written, and it was passed on from one
generation only in an oral form.
All of the religious services of
the Old Rite Orthodox Church are made in Russian, and the holidays are
celebrated with a 13 day gap in comparison to the New Style Orthodox, the name
which is applied sometimes to the mainstream Orthodox when they are compared to
the Old Rite ones. This gap is the result of the fact that the Old Believers
never adopted the Gregorian Calendar and are still using the Julian one.
Talking about religion and Old Rite
spirituality, Vovidenia and Uspenia monasteries, both in Tulcea County, are
unique places because they represent the only two Old Rite monastic settlements
from the world. Vovidenia hosting nuns and Uspenia monks.
Both of the two monastic
settlements give the visitor the feeling of walking in to a time capsule, from
the architecture to the practices and social etiquette, they preserved down to
the finest detail the ancestral culture of the Old Believers.
Hidden between the hilly plains of
Northern Dobrudja, the monastic settlements are a key-elements which makes
Romania a hotspot of Lipovan cultural and spiritual life.
Socially speaking, Lipovans are no
different from their Eastern neighbors, they still maintain a highly patriarchal
structure in which men play the major role in the household and in the communities,
women being traditionally responsible with taking care of the household and
raising the children. This structure is even better highlighted during
religious services when within the church men and women stay in separate rows,
never mixing in with each other.
Even with all of this, the small
group known to as the Lipovans, managed to culturally flourish over the
generation regardless of the fact that their heart is still in protest with the
practices that now dominate Eastern Christianity.
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