News

The publishing house of Ukrainian Catholic University in L’viv has printed out a book entitled Facing the Challenges of Unification and Discipline: Kyivan Orthodox Metropolitanate in 18th Century («Перед викликами уніфікації та дисциплінування: Київська православна митрополія у XVIII столітті») written by the Professor of our Department of History Maksym Iaremenko. This monograph is a part of the Kyivan Christianity book series.

The main theme of this work is the history of long and complicated process the Kyivan Orthodox Metropolitanate had to go through to be incorporated into a modernized unified Imperial Church structure headed by the newly created Holy Synod.

Professor Iurii Voloshyn in his review of this book draws attention to how Prof. Iaremenko manages to break a number of stereotypes. For instance, there is a popular statement that after the Kyivan Metropolitanate was redirected under the subordination of the Moscow Patriarchate in 1686 it was immediately reorganized in the Moscovian manner and all its peculiar Ukrainian features were eliminated. The scholar makes a hard scientific disprove of this statement with the help of a detailed study of the Kyivan Church’s inner life. He seems to be the first researcher to as this question: how effective the Holy Synod actually was in its attempts to turn Ukrainian Church into a proper part of a unified Imperial structure?