Authors

Nataliia Sinkevych¹;  ¹ Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany

Discussion

The period from the end of the 16th to the beginning of the 18th century is an epoch of special importance in Ukrainian history. Influenced by various religious and political centers, Kyiv intellectuals were forced to declare an independent Ukrainian Church tradition. Thus, at the end of the 16th and throughout the 17th century continued a process of "invention" of the Kyiv historiographical, hagiographic, and polemical tradition that, however, was hidden behind the special rhetorical tricks and narrative constructions and proclaimed as the return to the "ancient times" and the original sources. The main objective of the research project is to examine the intellectual strategies with which the Kyiv hierarchy reacted to external political, theological, and intellectual influences. It asks what ideas and practices were taken up by Kyiv's clerical elite in order to articulate their tradition and which ideas were refuted or simply ignored in the political declarations, polemical, historiographical, and hagiographic writings. The parallel "invention of Tradition" in the United and Orthodox Churches provides important material for comparing this process in both parts of the once-unified Kyiv Metropolia. The task of the project is not only to highlight the peculiarity of the Ukrainian ecclesiastical situation but also to classify the results of the study in a pan-European context. Therefore, in a second step, it will be asked whether and to what extent impulses emanated from Kyiv, have influenced the European religious and cultural centers. To achieve the goal of the project, political declarations, polemical, historical, and hagiographic sources as well as the library collections of the clergy are analyzed on five examination levels. The methodology consists of comparative, theological-hermeneutic methods, historical reconstruction and deconstruction, and the concept of the legitimation of power. In order to locate the results of the study in a pan-European context, the concepts of confessionalization, places of memory, and nation-building in early modern Europe are used.