The following is a book review from our friend and colleague Nicholas Chapman:

Herman, A Wilderness Saint: From Sarov, Russia to Kodiak, Alaska is a new book that I think will be of interest to many readers of this web site. It has been translated from Russian and contains material not previously available in English, which only became accessible in Russia after the fall of communism. Through its use of primary sources such as letters and reports, St. Herman’s life and character is revealed with startling clarity, together with many aspects of the wider Russian ecclesiastic mission to America of which he was an integral part. The three appendices bring the story of New Valaam up to our own time, offer details of the saint’s canonization by both the OCA and ROCOR in 1970 and provide more biographical background to some of the eyewitnesses to the saint’s life. The primary text is supported by easily referenced endnotes and rounded off by an index.

Of particular note for readers of this web site following previous articles published here will be the account of the martyrdom of St Peter the Aleut with a brief discussion of its historicity.

Further information about the book and how to order it in either print or digital formats can be found here. The monastery also published an earlier edition of this book in Russian, details of which may be found here. A look inside preview is available courtesy of Amazon here.

Herman, A Wilderness Saint: From Sarov, Russia to Kodiak, Alaska is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

New York Tribune, Wednesday, November 23, 1921

Thanksgiving Day as it is constituted as a civil holiday in the United States (and Canada) is not specifically found on the Orthodox liturgical calendar, but that doesn’t mean that Orthodox Christians in North America have ignored it.  Here’s a notice from the New York Tribune for a Thanksgiving Divine Liturgy held at St. Nicholas Cathedral in 1921, celebrated by Archbishop Alexander Nemolovsky and Archimandrite Patrick Mythen.

From all of us here at SOCHA, Happy Thanksgiving to all who are celebrating today!

Thanksgiving at St. Nicholas Cathedral, 1921 is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

1962 was a turning point in the history of Orthodox theological education in North America, and in turn was a major transition for Fr. Alexander as well.  As our readers surely know, Fr. Alexander is best known for his involvement with St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary.  Fr. Alexander arrived at the seminary as a faculty member in 1951, and was part of the institution’s growth into one of the major centers of Orthodox thought and scholarship in the western hemisphere by the end of the decade.  By 1962, the seminary had grown to the extent that it was prepared to move into a permanent facility, the now-familiar campus in Crestwood, New York.  The move to Crestwood also marked Fr. Alexander’s move to the position of seminary dean.

The two photographs shown here show Fr. Alexander at the cusp of these major developments, speaking at what appears to be either an event sponsored by the Federated Russian Orthodox Clubs (FROC, now the FOCA) or the Detroit Council of Orthodox Christian Churches (COCC), who have organized evening vespers services in Orthodox parishes around the Detroit area each Sunday evening during Lent since the late 1950s.  The venue appears to be Holy Ghost Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Church, a parish founded in 1919, which in the 1960s was under the jurisdiction of the Metropolia, and subsequently the OCA (though later it was a part of ROCOR, and now is a parish of the Patriarchate of Bulgaria).

The early 1960s were a transformative time in the history of the Metropolia, with St. Vladimir’s Seminary and its faculty playing a key role.  Fr. Alexander was instrumental in the early meetings of the Standing Council of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in America (SCOBA), which held its first meetings in 1960, and was an Orthodox observer to the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), when it opened its sessions in 1962.

This era found the Metropolia, especially Fr. Alexander and his colleagues at St. Vladimir’s, interested in the jurisdictional trajectory of the canonical chaos which defined Orthodoxy in America in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917.  Amongst the early academic explorations of the movement towards the granting of autocephaly to the Metropolia in 1970 was the publication of Alexander Bogolepov’s Toward an American Orthodox Church in 1963, early, tense encounters between the Metropolia and the Church of Russia that same year, and Fr. Alexander’s three-part exploration of the problems facing Orthodoxy in North America, which appeared in the St. Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly in 1964.

When Fr. Alexander came to Detroit on a winter’s evening in 1962, he was at the cusp of a truly transformative decade in his own career.  On November 30, 1962, following the institution’s move to its new Crestwood campus, Fr. Alexander was appointed to the position of Seminary Dean, replacing Metropolitan Leonty.  For the Life of the World, the book for which he is perhaps best known, was published the next year, which was followed by a string of similarly seminal works of Orthodox thought in the West, including The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy (1963), Introduction to Liturgical Theology (a reworking of his doctoral dissertation, first published in English in 1966), Great Lent (1969), and an edited anthology of modern Russian religious thought, Ultimate Questions (1964).

Of course, far removed from a Detroit church fellowship hall in 1962, the culmination of this decade of constant productivity was the granting of autocephaly to the Metropolia by the Patriarchate of Moscow in 1970.  This was a process of intense negotiations (what he would later term “a meaningful storm”), in which Fr. Alexander was intimately involved at nearly every stage.

Fr. Alexander Schmemann in Detroit, 1962 is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

Met. Leonty Turkevich

When Matthew asked me to write a piece about Leonty, I kept coming back to a single moment at the end of his life, a story for which there is a rare corroboration of accounts from multiple sources (one from the Moscow Patriarchate, the other from the Metropolia) that each give a unique picture of who Leonty was, and how his personality, longevity, and the weight of his institutional memory impacted those around him.

In early 1963, at the height of the Cold War, the National Council of Churches invited a delegation from the Church of Russia to visit the United States for a goodwill visit to acquaint the American religious establishment with leaders of the living, breathing Church behind the Iron Curtain.  Led by Archbishop Nikodim Rotov of Yaroslavl, head of the Patriarchate’s Department of External Relations, a side benefit of the delegation would be an opportunity for an informal assessment the true situation of the tensions between the Metropolia and the Patriarchal Exarchate as it existed on the ground, if not possible dialogue. Through the formation of the Exarchate in 1933, a longstanding lawsuit over control of St. Nicholas Cathedral in New York City, and stalled negotiations following the decision of the 7th All-American Sobor to renew the Metropolia’s administrative ties with Moscow in 1946, a bitter period of animosity between two jurisdictions with a shared history had dominated both local and national church life for decades.  Aside from an informal meeting in 1961 at a World Council of Churches meeting in New Delhi, by 1963, no formal or significant dialogue between the two parties had occurred for over a decade.

As he would recall over a decade later, one evening in March of 1963, Fr. Alexander Schmemann, Dean of St. Vladimir’s Seminary, received a telephone call from an Episcopalian acquaintance announcing that Nikodim and the delegation wished to visit the seminary, and would be arriving on campus within a few hours.  Schmemann quickly dispatched a call to Metropolitan Leonty to ask for permission to receive the delegation.  Leonty quietly replied, “receive them with love.”  The visit went well, and Schmemann arranged for Nikodim to meet with Leonty several days later over dinner at the Metropolia’s Chancery in Syosset.

Schmemann recalled the elderly Leonty descended the Chancery stairs that evening dressed in his trademark white cassock, “so majestic… and yet so simple and joyful, so obviously the head of the Church to which he had given his entire life.”  After dinner, Leonty rose to give an informal speech, in part a narrative of his ministry in America, as well as an expression of what the events meant for the future of Orthodoxy in North America.  His was an institutional memory that stretched back to the administration of Bishop Tikhon Belavin, the bishop who had invited the young Fr. Leonid Turkevich to the United States in 1906 to oversee the Minneapolis Seminary, which Turkevich repaid in turn by personally nominating his former bishop for the office of Patriarch of Moscow on the floor of the All-Russian Sobor eleven years later.  In fact, it is likely many of the events he described that evening occurred before the relatively young Nikodim (born in 1929) was even alive.  According to Schmemann, Leonty’s words movingly expressed his love for the Church of Russia, yet also his firm belief in the future of the Church in America. (Constance Tarasar, ed. Orthodox America, 1794-1976. Syosset, 1975. 262-3.)

Met. Nikodim Rotov

Several years later, Nikodim would recall the events of the Syosset dinner to Archimandrite Serafim Surrency, a priest who served as an assistant to Metropolitan John Wendland (then head of the Patriarchal Exarchate) at St. Nicholas Cathedral in New York City.  Surrency describes the elderly Leonty asking Nikodim firmly and directly, how he viewed Leonty and the other bishops of the Metropolia.  Though Nikodim was clearly moved by his meeting with Leonty, and the momentum of the evening would carry into several more informal dialogues between the Metropolia and the Patriarchate (especially Nikodim) in the ensuing years, reality dictated he reply “as kindly as he could:”

“Your Eminence, forgive me, but I have no choice but to regard you and your bishops as schismatics.”  According to Surrency, “…tears welled in the eyes of the aged Metr. Leonty.”  (Archimandrite Serafim Surrency. The Quest for Orthodox Church Unity in America. New York, 1973. 78.)

As a historian, this moment in a lifetime of truly monumental moments offers a good entry point by which we can understand the broader picture and historical narrativity of Leonty’s impact in America.  His role as a priest in the highest levels of diocesan administration, theological education, and publication shows the ambitious vision of the pre-Revolution North American Diocese to serve a rapidly growing, geographically expansive flock, and the extent to which the Revolution would fundamentally change this trajectory.  Leonty’s episcopal career (and the process by which he became a bishop) is a lens by which we can explore the deep divisions of the jurisdictional fracture of Orthodoxy in America in the wake of the rise of Bolshevism.  And in his final years, his hospitality and dialogue with Abp. Nikodim put in motion a series of sometimes tense, yet ultimately fruitful meetings leading to the granting of Autocephaly to the Metropolia in 1970, forming what is now the Orthodox Church in America.

In the months to come, I hope to further explore this dynamic figure, exploring how his roles within the Church found him intimately involved in some of the most controversial and heated moments Orthodoxy has seen on the North American continent, yet whose demeanor, deep spirituality, and kind and quiet disposition found him almost universally revered even in the face of discord.

Met. Leonty: A Life in Moments is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

While the United States Bureau of the Census produces raw statistical data on the findings of the census in the immediate aftermath of the enumeration, specific, personal information (basically, the individual schedules recorded by enumerators) is kept under confidential seal for a period of 72 years.  For historians, this means there’s an artificial barrier on how far we can go with this vital information.  With the exception of the 1890 census (which was almost entirely destroyed in a fire), we’ve been able to utilize federal census information going all the way back to the first count, in 1790.  With the advent of the internet, it’s become easier than ever to conveniently search for detailed, personal information and compile large amounts of material in relatively little time from fifteen of the twenty-three censuses.

Yet for the last ten years, we’ve been stuck at the composite picture of the United States as it was in 1930, in the early throes of the Great Depression, and the immediate aftermath of significant restrictions on immigration.  Monday, however, that picture changed quite a bit, as the National Archives released the records for the 1940 census, bringing us past the Depression and to the brink of the Second World War.

The release date was an interesting day, to say the least.  The record set covers some 132 million people, 3.8 million pages of records, coming in at about 18 terabytes of digital data (and, if you’re truly interested, it comes out to 4646 reels of microfilm, which would set you back a cool $580,750).  This was all released as raw image files, with no indexing done aside from the separation of schedules by their enumeration districts.  That’s where the public comes in.

After the unveiling at 9AM EDT, a mad flurry of researchers and volunteers from throughout the country flocked to the official website to begin downloading and indexing millions of pages worth of census schedules, many of them working in conjunction with FamilySearch.org, a rather comprehensive genealogy website operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  Immediately, all of the major genealogy sites started a de facto horse race to get files downloaded, indexed, and uploaded to their sites, a process estimated to last well into the summer.

By noon, the website had received almost 23 million hits, and was almost immediately rendered useless.  (According to the genealogy blog Ancestry Insider, the NARA’s contract with webhost Archives.com called for accessibility for 10 million hits and 25,000 concurrent users for the release date, with overflow handled by Amazon.com).  I spent all day furiously attempting to download several enumeration districts I was interested in perusing, and in several hours of work, somehow managed to download exactly one district, some 29 pages covering several blocks in midtown Manhattan.  By the late afternoon, it was impossible to get even a preview image to load.  By all accounts, the release was a general failure, with the demand far outweighing the anticipated threshold of interest.

Clearly, the release of the 1940 census was something anticipated by many, and it will be interesting to watch as the millions of schedules are indexed state-by-state in the coming months.  Slowly, we will see a more personal picture evolve out of this rich archive, indeed a much more personal picture than we’ve seen out of census documents in quite some time.  It is estimated over 20 million people who appear in these documents are still alive today.

For us here at SOCHA, it means we will be able to move a lot of our stories ten years into the future, and opens up a number of new avenues for research.  I’m excited to see where these documents will take us, and how we will be able to better tell the story of Orthodoxy in America as a result.

The 1940 Census Release: American History Moves Up a Decade is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

A little while back, Shorpy’s editors posted a somewhat morbid, but oddly engaging photograph of a burial near Washington, DC circa 1925, which came from the Library of Congress.  The picture had a rather minimal caption, so we have to go by what we see.  What appears to be a group of well-dressed immigrants are gathered graveside around a casket.  This is all pretty normal, except for the fact that the casket is propped up, and the head and shoulders of the deceased are visible through an opening in the lid.  Yikes.

What immediately jumped out at me when I looked closer, however, was the fact that peeking out of the back of the crowd is a priest.  Bald, bearded, and wearing a stole and pectoral cross.  The wheels started spinning.  It certainly looked Orthodox to me, but how could I prove it?

My research interests tend to be with Russian communities during this era, and this priest didn’t look familiar. Nor did the group of people look particularly Slavic to me.  I suspected they may have been Middle Eastern, which is a bit out of my expertise.  So I dispatched an email to my SOCHA colleague Matthew Namee, and after comparing notes for a little bit, we struck gold.  The priest in question is Fr. Job Salloom, who was the pastor of St. George Syrian (now Antiochian) Orthodox Church in Washington, DC.  And these, presumably, are some of his parishioners.

Fr. Job Salloom

There is a surprisingly large amount of information online about Salloom, much of it being oral history by his descendants (including some photographs).  Job Salloom came to America in 1904, and was ordained a priest in 1912.  He served the St. George parish in Washington for over twenty years, and served itinerantly when needed to communities throughout the general region during that period as well.  Fr. Job was apparently kind, well-liked, and had a lively sense of humor.  He was beloved by his family, and apparently his congregation as well.  According to the 1920 Census, Fr. Job and his wife Deby had five daughters and a son.  This picture captures him around halfway through his ministry in America, when he was a little older than 50, and about a decade before his 1936 death.

This little discovery has led to a different project Matthew will be introducing in a few days.  We’ve been on the phone about it constantly for the last few days, and I really think it’s going to be something our readers will enjoy.  Stay tuned here at the SOCHA blog for that, but in the meantime, do yourself a favor and poke around Shorpy for a while.  It’s well worth your time.

Discovering Fr. Job Salloom is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

Fr. Patrick Mythen, October 1920

We here at SOCHA would like to wish you and yours, Irish or not, a happy St. Patrick’s Day!  And who better to portray those wishes than a figure we have written quite extensively about, Fr. Patrick Mythen.  A proud descendent of the Irish political figure Henry Grattan, Mythen spent a good portion of his life working for various Irish political causes, most especially with the Protestant Friends of Irish Freedom.

Upon his conversion to Orthodoxy in 1920, the former Rev. James Grattan Mythen took the name Patrick as an expression of his Irish heritage. It should come as no surprise, then, that Mythen loved St. Patrick’s Day.  Ninety years ago today, in 1922, Archimandrite Patrick, then Vicar General of the Russian Archdiocese of North America, led the Protestant Friends of Irish Freedom’s battalion (with band) in the New York City St. Patrick’s Day parade.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day from all of us here at SOCHA!

St. Patrick’s Day with Fr. Patrick Mythen is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

Fr. Ilia Zotikov

One of the little mysteries I’ve been meaning to research for some time has a bit of a family connection.  This past week, I finally had the opportunity to delve into it, and the results were far different than I ever anticipated.

My great-grandparents were married on May 2/15, 1908 at St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral in New York City.  As someone who specializes in that particular era, and who has focused a lot of research on events and figures at St. Nicholas at the time, it’s always been a bit of a curiosity as to which priest married them.  With the number of notable clegymen in and around New York at the time, and being a historian, I just had to know.  Last week, while having lunch with my grandmother (their youngest daughter, now 97 years old), I asked if she had their marriage certificate.  A few minutes later, she retrieved a rather fascinating set of documents from a file drawer, which included not only the answer to my original question, but also led me to something I think our readers would find interesting.

In 1916, my great-grandparents,who had moved to Detroit, wrote to the cathedral and requested the metrical records for their wedding and the baptisms of the three of their children who were born in New York.  In return, they received pre-printed forms designed for this purpose, with the requested information from the metrical books filled in by hand by Vsevolod Andronoff, the cathedral’s deacon, and signed by Fr. Leonid Turkevich (the future Metropolitan Leonty), then the Dean of the Cathedral.

Fr. Alexander Hotovitzky (third from left) and Archimandrite Raphael Hawaweeny (fourth from left) assisting Bp. Tikhon at the blessing of the cornerstone of St. Nicholas Church, New York City, May 22, 1901

In the record for the marriage, I was surprised to find the name of a priest I had never seen before:  Fr. Ilia Zotikov.  When I got home, I searched through the print and online sources I normally use to find information on priests, and found surprisingly little.  Other than the fact that he was in New York at the early part of the 20^th century, Zotikov seemed to have fallen into obscurity.  Then, like any crafty, 21^st-century researcher, I ran a Google search in Russian.  Dozens of hits popped up.  This is where the story became something quite interesting.

In 1922, Fr. Ilia Zotikov, like untold thousands in his vocation during the Soviet era, was forced into the murky abyss of the Soviet prison system, where his personal and professional lives were interrupted by a dizzying series of arrests, trials, imprisonments, exile, and ultimately, death.  Of course, Orthodox Americans are quite familiar with the Hieromartyr Fr. Alexander Hotovitzky, who is depicted and venerated in iconography throughout the world, and whose biography has been published far and wide.  This has as much to do with the circumstances of his various trials and ultimate martyrdom in the Gulag in the Soviet Union as his prominence in the North American Diocese during the nearly two decades he served in the United States.  Yet the same cannot be said for Zotikov, even though his life, ministry, and subsequent fate were quite similar, and intrinsically tied, to those of Hotovitzky.

Ilia Ivanovich Zotikov was born into a priestly family in Finland in 1863.  He was educated at the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary, where his classmates included John Kochurov and Alexander Hotovitzky.  In 1895, Zotikov was one of a number of Russian seminarians recruited for service as missionaries in America by Bishop Nicholas Ziorov, Bishop of Alaska and the Aleutians.  Zotikov was assigned to be an assistant to Fr. Evtikhy Balanovitch, and both were sent to New York City to start the small parish that would ultimately become St. Nicholas Cathedral.

They arrived in New York with their wives, both named Mary, on April 1, 1895 (NY Sun, 4/2/1895).  On May 19^th, Bp. Nicholas ordained Zotikov to the priesthood in the parish’s tiny house parlor sanctuary at 323 2^nd Avenue (New York Herald, 5/20/1895).  When Balanovitch left St. Nicholas in 1896, Zotikov stayed on to assist Balanovitch’s replacement, his seminary classmate Fr. Alexander Hotovitzky, who had been ordained a priest in San Francisco earlier in the year.  Together they were instrumental in both the growth of the congregation and the subsequent building of the parish’s new church on 97^th Street, which would become the cathedral of the entire North American Diocese in 1905.  Hotovitzky became the Cathedral Dean, and Zotikov the Sacristan.  It was there that Zotikov officiated the marriage of my great-grandparents in 1908, and where, as my grandmother’s files revealed, Hotovitzky baptized their first daughter two years later.

In the late summer of 1910, Zotikov returned to Russia. For most of the ensuing decade, he served in various parishes in St. Petersburg.  In 1919, he was reassigned to Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow, where, alongside Hotovitzky, he served as Sacristan of the Cathedral and assistant to Patriarch Tikhon, in a nearly identical arrangement to that at St. Nicholas Cathedral more than a decade before.  There, the Patriarch, Hotovitzky, Zotikov, and Cathedral Dean Fr. Nicholas Arseniev were on the front lines of the defense against the repression of the Church by the Bolshevik government.  Both Patriarch Tikhon and Fr. Alexander would be arrested and imprisoned multiple times in the early years of Bolshevik rule.

Metropolitan Benjamin of St. Petersburg, a seminary classmate of Frs. Hotovitzky and Zotikov, before the Petrograd Revolutionary Tribunal, June 1922

In early 1922, the Bolshevik government ordered the seizure of all ecclesiastical vessels and objects of value held by the Church.  This was met with resistance by clergy and laity alike.  The clergy of Christ the Savior Cathedral, led by Hotovitzky, were especially instrumental in resisting the order, and meetings were held at Hotovitzky’s apartment to draft resolutions in opposition.  For his participation in these meetings, Zotikov was amongst a group of clergy and laity arrested in the spring of 1922, and was subsequently sent to Butyrki Prison.

In December, Zotikov, Hotovitzky, and others appeared before the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal.  Hotovitzky and two others were given ten-year sentences.  Most of the others, Zotikov amongst them, were sentenced to three years’ imprisonment and one year of deprivation of civil rights.  Appeals were unsuccessful, but in late 1923, many of the sentences were cut short on amnesty.  Zotikov returned to Christ the Savior, and in 1924, was reassigned to the Descent of the Holy Spirit, where he remained for several years.  Hotovitzky was left without a parish assignment, instead filling in where he was needed.

Zotikov was arrested again in June 1927.  Found to be in possession of the “Solovki Declaration,” a document issued by bishops imprisoned in the Solovki prison camp in opposition to the Soviet government, Zotikov was again imprisoned at Butyrki, put on trial, and sentenced to three years of exile in Vladimir, about 120 miles east of Moscow.  There, he became rector of a small cemetery chapel then serving as the cathedral for the entire Diocese of Vladimir following the forced closure of Dormition Cathedral earlier in 1927.  By this point in time, Soviet law had restricted the clergy from nearly every aspect of their vocations, leaving priests like Zotikov on dangerous ground as they attempted to perform even the most basic sacramental duties.  By 1929, widespread arrests of clergymen were underway.

In 1993, the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate published an article by Andrei Kozarzhevsky about parish life in Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s, which sheds some light on this period of Zotikov’s life.  (Thе article was recently translated into English and published on the Russian website Pravoslavie.ru.)  Kozarzhevsky was baptized by Zotikov in 1918, and was well acquainted with both Zotikov and Hotovitzky in his adolescence.  As a child, he assisted Zotikov during services in Vladimir, and recalled Zotikov’s third arrest, on October 13^th, 1930, for “membership in a counter-revolutionary organization of churchmen,” that being the Church.

On October 19^th, 1930, Zotikov was convicted by the OGPU (the arm of the Soviet secret police who spearheaded the repression of religious groups) and was relegated to the notoriously brutal Vladimir Central Prison.  On October 23^rd, Zotikov was sent for execution.  Some sources state both he and Protodeacon Michael Lebedev were shot by a firing squad, though Kozarzhevsky claims he suffered a fatal heart attack on the way to the execution.   Regardless, Fr. Ilia Zotikov is considered a Hieromartyr, and is commemorated according to the church calendar with the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia on January 25/February 7.

Andrei Kozarzhevsky’s recollections of Zotikov do not end with his death.  After Fr. Alexander Hotovitzky was martyred in the Gulag in 1937, Kozarzhevsky came into possession of a few of Hotovitzky’s personal effects, including a copy of a poem written by Hotovitzky in New York during the summer of 1910, on the occasion of a “triple event:” The feast of St. Elias, Zotikov’s name-day, and his imminent departure for Russia.

By any measure, it is clear that Zotikov and Hotovitzky (and their wives) were particularly close, a bond which apparently began in seminary, yet was forged largely in America.  When Hotovitzky departed for Russia in 1900 to raise money for the building of St. Nicholas Church, it was Zotikov who officiated the service blessing his trip.  When the church complex was finished, the Hotovitzkys and Zotikovs were neighbors in its apartments.  Mary Hotovitzky and Mary Zotikov later served together on the board of the Cathedral Sisterhood.

Far away from their native land, the two former classmates depended on each other, and continued to do so after they were reunited in Russia, where they ultimately met similar fates in the Gulag.  It is no surprise, then, that Fr. Alexander Hotovitzky’s 1910 poem was “dedicated to my best friend Fr. Ilia Zotikov.”

A note on sources:  Much of the metrical data for this article, including the particular dates of Fr. Zotikov’s biography, can be found (in Russian) here.  Additionally, biographical details and a brief biography of Zotikov can be found in The Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of Central Russia (Vladimir Moss, 2009, 657-8), available for download (along with other similar works) here.

Fr. Ilia Zotikov: A Hieromartyr in a File Drawer is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

I think it’s a rather unique picture of what Orthodox life was like in this era, especially given the political overtones of the repression of the Church of Russia, which we see in the first half of the article.  With their brothers and sisters in Russia experiencing the initial stages of a rather aggressive anti-religious campaign from the fledgling Bolshevik government, the North American Archdiocese were experiencing crises of their own in the wake of the Russian Revolutions of 1917.

In Russia, the Bolshevik government had instituted the national move to the Gregorian (New) Calendar on February 1/14, 1918 (February 1st became February 14th).  The Church of Russia resisted this change, and in discussions of the All-Russian Sobor of 1917-8 (in session as the calendar switch went into effect), determined to retain the Old Calendar.

By 1923, however, this would be tested by the rise to power of the Living Church, a reformist movement that had coalesced out of several radical factions within the Russian Church over the previous two decades.  Backed by the Bolshevik government, the Renovationists attempted to force the implementation of the New Calendar, and over time, the calendar issue became a distinct point of differentiation between the so-called “Renovationist” and “Tikhonite” factions within the Church of Russia.

In America, this differentiation, apparently, also resulted in a distinct rejection of the New Calendar within the North American Archdiocese.  In December of 1923, the Archdiocese was in the throes of its legal battles with the Living Church-backed John Kedrovsky, who had returned to America in October claiming to be the Archbishop of North America and the Aleutian Islands.  With confusing accounts coming out of Russia regarding the status of Patriarch Tikhon, reports of bizarre and troubling attacks against the Church and religious life by the Soviet government, and very real threats of the loss of St. Nicholas Cathedral and other church properties in American courts, the Archdiocese chose to reject the recent decision of the Pan-Orthodox Congress to institute the use of the Revised Julian (or New) Calendar.

Plainly, for many Orthodox Christians in America of Russian descent in this era, the New Calendar was not primarily associated with a Pan-Orthodox Congress, but with Bolshevism  and the repression of the beloved Patriarch Tikhon, who was obviously revered in all corners of Orthodox America.

The allowance for the use of the New Calendar within what would become known as the Metropolia would not come until the 13th All-American Sobor in 1967.  While some corners of the OCA have almost universally moved to the Revised Julian Calendar, there are yet still many parishes throughout the United States and Canada that will be celebrating the Nativity of Christ two weeks from now.  As Matthew outlined the other day, there is similar plurality across the other jurisdictions in America.  Yet regardless of when we observe this important day, it is with the same spirit of joy in the birth of Christ.

Christmas, the New Calendar, and the Russian Church in 1923 is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

I quickly found that writing such an entry was difficult, precisely out of the primary question Matthew posed in his entry:  What truly constitutes a parish?  I was consulting parish and diocesan websites, several books published by the church (dating back as early as the 1940’s), newspapers, and couldn’t find a set standard anywhere.  Some parishes gauged their founding from the building of their first sanctuary.  Others dated it from the first vestiges of a board of trustees, or the first time there was really any appreciable, united Armenian community.  Even more confusing are the so-called “Mission Parishes,” which ordinarily do not have (and probably never have had) either a permanent sanctuary or a priest, often both.  These communities tend to date their founding by the year in which they were formally recognized as a Mission Parish, which doesn’t seem to have been general practice until the 1970’s, even if an Armenian presence and some modicum of organized church life existed long before.

My home parish (when I’m not in Chicago), St. John Armenian Church in Southfield, Michigan, is celebrating its 80^th anniversary this year.  That’s all well and fine, except the first evidence of a parish organization apparently dates to 1909, and first priest assigned to Detroit arrived in 1913.  There was no sanctuary, so the community met in a number of borrowed spaces, especially St. John Episcopal Church in downtown Detroit (which, interestingly, also housed the plenary sessions of the 4^th All-American Sobor in 1924, for those interested in Metropolia/OCA history), until they could afford to purchase land and build a church of their own.  The movement to build the first church began in 1928, and it was ready for consecration in 1931.

So there’s three possible anniversary dates here if we look at when the community came together, when the first priest came, and when the first church was built:  1909, 1913, and 1931.  To give you an idea of what standard the parish ended up using, in 2006, we celebrated our 75^th anniversary, and this year we celebrate the 80^th.

Then there’s the situation of the Armenian community in Chicago, which seems to truly defy explanation, and gets at the root of the incredibly strange arrangements that combined to form the Diocese of the Armenian Church in America in 1898 (which I hope to cover later on).  The previous year, the entire country was separated into four “ecclesiastical districts:” Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Fresno (California), and Chicago, and the scant amount of Armenian clergy distributed amongst them.   This could be considered an odd choice, considering an 1898 list of the seven largest Armenian communities in the United States prepared by Bishop Hovsep Saradjian ranked Chicago dead last, numbering just 400 people.   Yet this was the biggest Armenian community in the Midwest at the time.  Fr. Khat Markarian was assigned to travel to Chicago, but a disagreement over his reassignment from his parish in Boston resulted in Markarian instead going to New York.  No replacement was named, and Chicago languished.

While other communities around the country rapidly grew, taking advantage of massive waves of immigration to build churches and the infrastructures of parish life, Chicago was a comparative non-starter.  Though he visited nearly every corner of the country, Bp. Saradjian never visited the city.  In 1901, he sent Fr. Vahan Messirlian to Chicago to organize a slate of trustees to establish a parish, and while he may have been marginally successful in the short-term, there were no representatives from Chicago at the 1902 Diocesan Assembly.   There were loose associations of parish life over the next decade, but there would not be a permanent priest assigned to Chicago until 1915.  St. Gregory the Illuminator Armenian Church formally dates its establishment to that year, and was the culmination of all that had happened in Chicago since 1898.  Since St. Gregory is the oldest Armenian parish in Illinois, is 1915 really the right year to pick for its establishment?

So, like Matthew, I’m struggling a bit with how one gauges the intricacies of parish formation, especially looking at situations that were anomalous both in geographical dispersal as well as the highly irregular way in which the Armenian Church in America constituted its hierarchical administration in its earliest years.  Long story short, I guess, that list I mentioned at the opening is forthcoming, once I can determine some kind of standard, and wade through the evidence enough to come to a consensus.

Until then, SOCHA readers, are there any particular issues you want me to cover about the Armenian Church?

This article was written by Aram Sarkisian.

What is an Armenian parish? is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.

An Armenian Apostolic church in Worcester, Massachusetts

Recently, there has been interest from SOCHA to explore the history of the so-called “Oriental Orthodox” family of churches.  As a longtime reader of this blog and a member of the Armenian Church, I volunteered to write an article or two. 

First, a bit of a personal introduction.  My name is Aram Sarkisian, and I’m currently a graduate student at the University of Chicago.  I’m both Russian and Armenian by ancestry.  I was raised in the Armenian Church, and am an ordained subdeacon in the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America, which is under the administration of the Holy See of Etchmiadzin. 

That is not to say that I am unfamiliar with Eastern Orthodoxy.  My primary research interest as a scholar is in the history of Russian Orthodoxy in early twentieth century America.  Additionally, my maternal grandfather was a priest in Canadian and Midwest Dioceses of the Orthodox Church in America, so I have also spent a great deal of time in a variety of Orthodox parishes as well. 

It’s been my experience that many in the Eastern Orthodox family have only a passing knowledge about the Armenian Church, so I thought it might be helpful to give a short history of who we are and how we fit into the general scene of Christianity in America before getting into more particular historical posts.

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The Armenian Church claims its roots from the Apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew, who tradition tells us preached the Gospel in the lands of historic Armenia soon after the time of Christ.  Though various Christian communities did exist thereafter, the Armenian kingdoms remained officially pagan until the dawn of the fourth century, when St. Gregory the Illuminator, a Parthian by birth, converted the Armenian King Drtad to Christianity in 301 AD (the date traditionally held, but it may have been several years later).  Because of the conversion of his kingdom, Armenia is generally regarded as being the first nation to adopt Christianity as its state religion.

In the following centuries, Armenians cultivated a unique cultural and liturgical identity tempered by encounters with foreign invaders and other Christian groups.  The Armenian Church rejected the Council of Chalcedon in 451 not only for specific theological issues, but also due to the fact that the Armenian delegation could not physically attend the Council, as Armenians were fighting off the advances of Persian invaders as the Council convened.  Thus, the Armenian Church has remained in canonical isolation from the Eastern Orthodox family of Churches for over fifteen centuries.  Instead, we are a so-called Non-Chalcedonian, or Oriental Orthodox Church, in communion with the Coptic, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Syriac, and Indian Churches.

The Non-Chalcedonian Churches are all rather different, each having unique rites and languages.  For Eastern Orthodox Christians, one could feel relatively at home and find much familiar in the services and ambience of a parish in Russia as they could in a parish in America, Syria, Greece, or Japan.  Concelebration is common.  For Oriental Orthodox Christians, an Armenian would find few commonalities in an Ethiopian parish, and an Indian would probably be lost in a Coptic liturgy.  While we are theologically united, there does not seem to be a great deal of communication, concelebration, or understanding within our family of Churches, especially on the local, parish level. 

So what does that mean in America?  How did Armenians get here, where and how do we worship?  Armenian immigration to the United States didn’t really exist on a widespread basis until the end of the 19^th century, with most of the early Armenian immigrants coming from the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East for educational reasons.  The earliest Armenian communities to coalesce in America were in New England and, later, California.  These early communities largely worshipped in local Protestant parishes in lieu of churches of their own.  They formed cultural and fraternal organizations, library societies, and political groups, and out of these institutions came the embryonic forms of Armenian parishes.

The first parish community emerged in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1889, which itself is a topic for another entry.  In 1897, the Armenian community in America was separated into four “Ecclesiastical Districts:” Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Chicago, and Fresno, California, each under the administration of a single priest.  The smaller communities of New York City, Troy, New York, and Philadelphia were also given spiritual oversight on a less formal basis.  In 1898, Catholicos Mgrdich I, through an encyclical issued from the Holy See of Etchmiadzin, established the Diocese of the Armenian Church of America.

In the 113 years since, the Armenian Church in America has grown exponentially from coast to coast, though unfortunately through several waves of immigration coming out of moments of tragedy for the Armenian people.   Of course, the first of these was a result of the Armenian Genocide, a series of systematic exterminations of the Armenian populations of Eastern Anatolia at the hands of the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923.  To a lesser extent, there would also be waves of immigration from Soviet Armenia in the decades to come, as well as the Middle East in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, which coincided with the beginning of a brutal conflict with Azerbaijan, another wave of Armenian immigration from post-Soviet states began, which continues to this day.

Thus, the Armenian community in America is really quite diverse within itself, reflecting immigrants that came not only from Armenia and Turkey, but also many other places as well.  Linguistically, due to both this diversity and Americanization of 3^rd and 4^th-generation Americans, there are a lot of bases to cover.  The Armenian Church worships in Classical Armenian, though in some parishes a limited amount of English, Russian, or even Turkish is often used in lections or sermons.  Outside of worship, you’re likely to hear a number of languages spoken in the average Coffee Hour, from Eastern or Western Armenian to English, Russian to Arabic, Turkish to French.  English is most common, and probably could be considered the vernacular, but many of our parishes are still Armenian speaking at a significant level.

There is also a jurisdictional divide in the United States and Canada, which came purely out of a political disagreement and the fallout of the 1933 assassination of Archbishop Levon Tourian (again, a story best told in another entry).  Local divisions emerged, parallel parishes were established, and the administrative division became official in 1957 when a group of parishes entered under the jurisdiction of the Catholicosate of Cilicia, with the remaining parishes staying under the authority of the Catholicosate of Etchmiadzin.  Thus, there are Eastern and Western Dioceses (Etchmiadzin), and Eastern and Western Prelacies (Cilicia).  The schism is not a break in Eucharistic communion, but it is, in many places, an acrimonious split that translates to limited relations between the two parties. 

This is, of course, a rather short and barebones introduction to who we are as a Church, but I hope, in the future, to fill in the blanks with some interesting material about the Armenian Church, and how it is has interacted with the Eastern Orthodox Church on the North American Continent.  There are many commonalities in our witness in America, and much we all can learn from each other.  I thank SOCHA for being so accommodating and willing to entertain an Armenian voice, and I am glad to lend a hand to broaden their exploration of the rich tapestry of ancient Christianity on the North American continent.

This article was written by Aram Sarkisian.

A Short Introduction to the Armenian Church in the United States is a post from OrthodoxHistory.org. All rights reserved. Your use of this article is subject to our Terms of Use.