August 19 (Thank you!)

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This Day in the Life of the Church

August 19, 2023


Greetings on the feast of the Lord's Transfigruation and on the succesful completion of our fundraiser for this project. Thank you very much for praying, donating, subscribing and wishing us well. Yours, This Day in the Life of the Church team


Boris Pasternak (+1960). The Poems of Yuri Zhivago. “August”

Transfiguration

This morning, faithful to its promise,
The early sun seeped through the room
In an oblique strip of saffron
From the curtains to the couch.

It covered with its burning ochre
The nearby woods, the village homes,
My bedstead and my still moist pillow,
The edge of wall behind the books.

Then I remembered the reason why
My pillowcase was slightly damp.
I had dreamed you were walking through the woods
One after another to see me off.

You walked in a crowd, singly, in pairs,
Then someone remembered that today
Was the sixth of August, old style,
The Transfiguration of Our Lord.

Ordinarily a flameless light
Issues on this day from Tabor,
And autumn, clear as a sign held up,
Rivets all gazes to itself.

And you walked through little, beggarly,
Naked, trembling alder scrub
To the spicy red woods of the graveyard
Burning like stamped gingerbread.

The sky superbly played the neighbor
To the hushed crowns of its trees,
And distances called to each other
In the drawn-out voices of the cocks.

Death, like a government surveyor,
Stood in the woods among the graves,
Scrutinizing my dead face,
So as to dig the right-sized hole.

You had the physical sensation
Of someone’s quiet voice beside you.
It was my old prophetic voice
Sounding, untouched by decay:

“Farwell, azure of Transfiguration,
Farwell, the Second Savior’s gold.

Ease with a woman’s last caress
The bitterness of my fatal hour.

“Farwell, years fallen out of time!
Farwell, woman: to an abyss
Of humiliations you threw down
The challenge! I am your battlefield.

“Farwell, the sweep of outspread wings,
The willful stubbornness of flight,
And the image of the world revealed in words,
And the work of creation, and working miracles.”

1946-1953 Tr. from Russian by Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky
Pantheon Books 2010


An Action Often Sets in Motion a Counter-Reaction

FourthCrusadeMap

Anti-Western riots broke out on this day in Constantinople in 1203

The Fourth Crusade vividly demonstrated how estranged Western and Eastern Christians had become since the eleventh-century schism. Toward the end of the twelfth century, it became clear that Byzantium could not compete economically against the Italian maritime republics. The frustration of Byzantines with the “Latins” and their arrogant behavior toward the “Eastern schismatics” resulted in a massacre of the Genoese and Pisan inhabitants of Constantinople in 1182. Neither children nor the elderly were spared. There were about sixty similar pogroms throughout the Empire. By the time of the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204), crusaders had been operating in the former territories of the Eastern Empire for over a century. They rightly observed that for the Byzantines, their Muslim neighbors often were closer than the Westerners. Such is the background for the Fourth Crusade, which started off on the wrong foot. Pope Innocent IV excommunicated some Crusaders for taking over, at Venetian insistence (the Crusaders owed them for transportation), the Roman Catholic city of Zara, in modern-day Croatia, on their way to Constantinople. While in Zara, the Crusaders received the emissaries of Alexios Angelos, son of the deposed Isaac II Angelos (1185–1195). The envoys explained that Alexios was the rightful claimant for the throne of the Eastern Roman Empire. The opinions of the Crusaders were divided. They decided to detour to Holy City of Jerusalem, and several leaders signed a treaty with Alexios agreeing to restore him to Constantinople. At this time, in 1203, they camped outside the city walls. An attack by Constantinopolitan mobs on the Latin districts inside the City “invited” the Crusaders in even more, in order to take it over and secure control over the best location in Europe for their future operations. However, the capture of the City happened only in the following year. At this point, in retaliation for the massacre, the “Latins” attacked the “infidels”: the city’s Muslim quarter.


From the First Generations of the ROCOR Bishops Who Already Grew Up Abroad

MitrVladimirTikhonitskii-1-e1642771602758

On the left: Met. Vladimir (Tikhonitskii) the first hierarch of the exarchate (1947-1959), next to him Archim. Job (Leont'ev) with Kursk-Root Icon, Bishop Nathanael (Lv'vov), Metrop. Anastasii (Gribanovskii), the ROCOR first hierarch (1936-1964) Archim. Leontii (Bartoshevich). The photo is taken in June 1950 in Geneva

Bishop Leontii of Geneva passed away on this day in 1956 .

Bishop Leontii was born Lev Bartoshevich in St. Petersburg in 1914. His father fought in the White Army and then moved to Serbia, where his wife could only join him in 1924, coming with their two sons from Soviet Russia. Later, the father moved to Switzerland, while the mother and sons remained in Yugoslavia.

In 1932, Lev graduated from the Russian high school in Belgrade, and in 1938 from the Theological Faculty of the University of Belgrade. He was a spiritual child of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco and benefited from attending Milkovo Monastery. This was the Russian monastery in Serbia; its abbot, Schema-Archimandrite Ambrose (Kurganov, d. 1933), tonsured a number of future hierarchs of the ROCOR. The future great Serbian spiritual father Fr. Thaddeus (Strabulovich) of Vitovnica began his path there, too. In 1941, both Lev and his older brother Andrei were tonsured monks in the Serbian monastery of Tuman. The same year, Fr. Leontii was ordained by Metropolitan Anastasii to serve in the Russian Church in Belgrade. In 1943, he was assigned to the Russian Church in Geneva, which in 1945–1946 became the center of the ROCOR. After World War II , all bishops save one from the Belarussian Churchб along with several of their counterparts from the Ukrainian Church joined the ROCOR. To counterbalance the number of “outsiders” within its episcopate, the ROCOR consecrated several of “their own,” including Archimandrite Leontii asBishop of Geneva (1950) Vicar of the Western European Diocese of the ROCOR .  There were a lot of expectations connected the need to represent the ROCOR at this capital of the ecumenical movement and Leontii’s ability to do so. However, in 1956, Bishop Leontii passed away from a complicated case of influenza.

Sources:

History of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia from Its Beginning to the Present. Part VI. Comprehensive Index of the Bishops of the Church Abroad with Short Biographies https://www.rocorstudies.org/2020/02/17/history-of-the-russian-orthodox-church-outside-russia-from-its-beginning-to-the-present-part-vi/

Синодик РПЦЗ. Леотний Бартошевич [A Commemoration book of ROCOR. Leontii Bartoshevich] Archive. https://archiv.livejournal.com/209974.html?


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