A16 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, APRIL 25 , 2022
BY ISABELLE KHURSHUDYAN,
ROBERT KLEMKO
AND KOSTIANTYN KHUDOVbucha, ukraine — While wait-
ing for the archpriest to bless their
baskets of food with his holy wa-
ter-soaked brush, locals struck up
conversations with each other —
about matters only they could un-
derstand. Maybe in past years,
they would have exchanged reci-
pes for their traditional holiday
cakes. This Sunday, they traded
horror stories about their time
under Russian occupation.
The Bucha residents were
standing outside a white, gold-
domed church. The grounds had
become the site of a mass grave of
their neighbors.
“I come here every year for
Easter, but especially this year.
Because I lived. They were shoot-
ing at me,” said Ta tiana. She then
started crying, unable to say
more.
This Orthodox Easter — typi-
cally a colorful occasion with
frosted cakes and painted eggs —
was a somber but defiant one in
Ukraine. It marked the 60th day
of a bloody war.
Perhaps no place in Ukraine
has come to symbolize the coun-
try’s suffering more than Bucha, a
city about 30 minutes outside of
Kyiv where Russian soldiers tor-
tured and killed hundreds of resi-
dents. But streets that had been
covered in Ukrainian bodies and
destroyed Russian military equip-
ment were clean Sunday morn-
ing. People who had to leave be-
hind their homes, some of which
are now destroyed, returned.
Bucha’s Church of St. Andrew
and Pyervozvannoho All Saints,
which had been turned into a
burial site, welcomed guests in
that very field.
The Easter service was an act of
resilience and a time to gather
with a community that under-
stands just how impossible trying
to return to normal feels right
now. Archpriest Andriy Galavin
condemned Russian soldiers’ ac-
tions in his sermon and urged
worshipers “not to become evil
when you fight evil.”
He smiled as he walked
through a line of people outside
the church who had placed their
baskets on the ground in front of
them. He blessed each one, spray-
ing both the food and the person
with water. Some laughed as the
drops splashed across their face.
For Anna Podolyanko, the day
was bittersweet. It marked the
first time she had seen her father,
Viktor, a Bucha resident, since
Russian forces withdrew from the
city three weeks ago. She had nev-
er visited St. Andrew’s before, but
it felt like an appropriate place to
spend the holiday with her family.
After dozens of bodies were ex-
humed nearby, Easter service
here was a reminder of what was
lost and also a show of survival.
“I wanted to hug my f ather, and
I wanted to cry,” Podolyanko said.
A day usually reserved for cel-
ebration was marked with anger
and loss. In Odessa, a strategic
Black Sea port, missile strikes on
Saturday killed at least eight peo-
ple, including a 3-month-old, and
injured 18, Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky said, beforeadding with disgust, “What a
great Easter holiday we’re hav-
ing.” Zelensky referred to Russian
soldiers as “scumbags.”
Some cities instituted an earli-
er curfew for the weekend, out of
concern that civilian areas could
be purposefully targeted by the
Russian military amid the festivi-
ties.
In his Easter message, Metro-
politan Epiphanius, the leader of
the Orthodox Church of Ukraine,
said, “Despite the sanctity of Holy
Week and the Resurrection of
Christ for all Christians, Russian
troops not only did not stop their
crimes, but they, as if inspired by
Satan himself, multiplied blood-
shed.
“Throughout Lent, Russia,
which considers itself a strong-
hold of true Christianity, has de-
stroyed our cities and villages,
killed innocent people and de-
stroyed everything it could,” he
added.In Chernihiv — a city near
Ukraine’s border with Belarus
that saw more than 700 people,
both military and civilians, killed
in the Russian invasion, accord-
ing to local officials — hundreds of
believers visited the Church of St.
Catherine, a 307-year-old struc-
ture topped with five golden
domes.
Yurii and Ta isia, a married cou-
ple from the region who declined
to share their surnames for secu-
rity reasons, said they left their
own Russian Orthodox Church at
the beginning of the war and re-
solved never to return after seeing
images of Russian violence
against civilians. They grew up
speaking a mix of Russian, Ukrai-
nian and Belarusian but are learn-
ing to speak Ukrainian exclusive-
ly after Moscow’s full-scale inva-
sion.
“Previously, we were indiffer-
ent because we felt God was for
everyone,” Ta isia said. “But wechanged our minds after we saw
the atrocities the Russians did.”
Tensions between the Russian
wing of the Orthodox Church,
with its pro-Kremlin patriarch,
and Orthodox leaders in Ukraine
predated this war. The Ukrainian
Orthodox Church is “self-govern-
ing” but remains under the juris-
diction of the Moscow Patriarch-
ate. That is separate from the Or-
thodox Church of Ukraine, which
is three years old and was founded
as a direct result of the burgeon-
ing movement to peel away from
the Russian Orthodox Church and
create a purely independent ec-
clesiastical entity for Ukraine.
Evstratiy Zoria, the Ukrainian
Orthodox archbishop of Cherni-
hiv and Nizhyn, said in an inter-
view that “what happened with
Russian Orthodoxy over the last
three decades is the fruits of
propaganda — the idea that Rus-
sia is something greater than
state, that Ukraine really does notexist and is just part of great
‘Russian world.’ ”
Zoria’s hope is that the Ukraini-
an and Russian Orthodox church-
es can coexist in Ukraine as long
as they agree on a rejection of the
Russian Federation’s territorial
ambitions.
“A ll those who understood that
‘Russian world’ is a lie must share
their knowledge with other pa-
rishioners,” Zoria said, “and I be-
lieve that slowly we can spread
this understanding and we will
have peaceful, fruitful and real
unity without any enforcement.
We are a democratic country.”
In Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv that
saw some of the heaviest fighting
between Ukrainian and Russian
soldiers, Archpriest Volodymyr
Molnar’s damaged church had
few visitors on Sunday morning.
“If you wanted to see a lot of
people, you should’ve come last
year,” he said in an interview.
His church was the first thing
many evacuees saw as they care-
fully made their way around the
ruins of a bridge that Ukrainian
forces destroyed to stop the Rus-
sian military’s advance to Kyiv.
Many were dehydrated and had
gone days without eating. For
some people escaping the battles
in the city, t he basement of a small
wooden chapel on the property
became a shelter for the night —
before they fled farther away in
the morning.
Molnar built it all himself three
years ago. When he had to evacu-
ate to a neighbor’s home, he said,
leaving the church behind felt like
abandoning a child. When he re-
turned, the window glass was
shattered. Walls that had been a
crisp white color have smoke
stains and holes from shrapnel.
The home on the property, where
he lived with his wife and three
children, was reduced to rubble.
The chapel that had served as a
temporary haven caught fire after
artillery hit it, and it burned to the
ground.
“We’ll live,” Molnar said.
“Somehow, we’ll resume our lives
and live. Right now, it’s just im-
portant to have peace.”Klemko reported from Chernihiv,
Ukraine. Serhii Korolchuk in Chernihiv
and Erin Cunningham in Washington
contributed to this report.Amid the ruins of Bucha and Chernihiv, Ukrainians mark O rthodox Easter
NICOLE TUNG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Andriy Galavin, archpriest of the Church of St. Andrew i n Bucha, Ukraine, blesses residents a nd their food as they gather outside the
church after a service on Sunday. The church’s grounds were turned into a mass burial site during Russian occupation.war in ukraineHoan Ton-ThatCEO & Co-Founder, Clearview AIWednesday, April 27 at 11:00 a.m.Ton-That discusses how facial recognitiontechnology is being deployed in the war inUkraine and around the world.To register to watch, visit:wapo.st/clearviewapril2022 or scan codebelow using a smartphone camera:Listen wherever podcasts are available.@POSTLIVE #POSTLIVE