The quiet village of Ptycha has become an unlikely battleground for the Orthodox faithful in western Ukraine, where the divide between pro- and anti-Moscow factions plays out far from the eastern fron
The quiet village of Ptycha has become an unlikely battleground for the Orthodox faithful in western Ukraine, where the divide between pro- and anti-Moscow factions plays out far from the eastern front of the war-torn country. Armed with sticks, spades and Molotov cocktails, the Orthodox faithful in the Ukrainian-speaking village in December moved against each other, leaving at least one cleric with a bloodied head, according to video footage that went viral across Ukraine.
Since the outbreak of the separatist conflict in April 2014, passions have steadily risen in the ex-Soviet nation, with tensions crossing political and even religious faultlines.
After Ukraine gained independence in 1991 a conflict erupted between the Ukrainian Orthodox Church backed by Moscow and a breakaway Kiev-based Ukrainian Ortho-dox Church. Now the war pitting the Ukrainian Ar-my against pro-Russian separatists in the east has sharply exacerbated those strains, leading to a sch-ism among churchgoers.
In Ptycha, some 350 km west of Kiev, the 1,000-odd parishioners are divided over the blue and white shrine where they worship. The parish belongs to the Moscow-backed Church but an informal local referendum in 2014 showed that a majority of villagers wanted it to come under control of the Kiev Patriarchate.
“The annexation of Crimea and the war in the east have clearly shown which church is really Ukrainian,” Father Ilarion, the head of the diocese of the Kiev Patriarchate in the western Rivne region, where the parish is located, told AFP. “The priests of the Moscow Church hold services in Russian, they refuse to pray for the Ukrainian army and hold burial services for Ukrainian soldiers killed at the front.”
After the improvised plebiscite, clerics of the two churches took turns to conduct services at the Ptycha shrine. But the fragile equilibrium was upended when a Kiev court in early December ruled that the parish belonged to the Moscow-backed Orthodox Church.
