Much of the analysis presented in the essays that make up this book deals with the responses of Ukraine's Eastern Christians to the challenge of the national idea. The book places the history and current status of Ukraine's Orthodox and Greek Catholic communities into the context of the modern Ukrainian national revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the resurgence of Ukrainian national consciousness in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Product Description: Ukrainian Cossacks used icon painting to investigate their relationship not only with God but also their relationship with the Russian tsar. Could Emperor Peter I and his adversary in the Battle of Poltava (1709)--the Cossack Hetman Ivan Mazepa--be depicted in the same icon? Why did the Cossack colonels commission icons with the portraits of their tsars, but not of their own Cossack leaders, the hetmans? Could a Catholic king be portrayed in an Orthodox icon? Why are the Russian tsars and Orthodox hierarchs missing on some of the Zaporozhian Cossack icons? In this groundbreaking study, Serhii Plokhy provides answers to these and many other questions pertaining to the political and religious culture of Ukrainian Cossackdom, as reflected in the Cossack-era paintings, icons, and woodcuts...read more

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Product Description: The All-Ukrainian Orthodox Church Council was formed in 1917 in Kyiv and consisted of representatives of the clergy and the laity from all parts of Ukraine. Headed by well-known church leaders, the council was determined to put an end to the church's dependence on Moscow and to devote special attention to the Ukrainianization of the parishes and the liturgy...read more