Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium

By Myrna Kostash

“Part spiritual quest, part scholarly inquiry, part travel memoir, Prodigal Daughter is as richly layered as the civilization [Kostash] explores.” —The Edmonton Journal

A deep-seated questioning of her inherited religion resurfaces when Myrna Kostash chances upon the icon of St. Demetrius of Thessalonica. A historical, cultural and spiritual odyssey that begins in Edmonton, ranges around the Balkans, and plunges into a renewed vision of Byzantium in search of the Great Saint of the East delivers the author to an unexpected place—the threshold of her childhood church. An epic work of travel memoir, Prodigal Daughter sings with immediacy and depth, rewarding readers with a profound sense of an adventure they have lived. This book will appeal to readers interested in Ukrainian-Canadian culture, the Eastern Church, and medieval history, as well as to fans of Kostash’s bold creative nonfiction.

“Prodigal Daughter is at one and the same time an anthropological, cultural, and religious quest on two levels: the personal, autobiographical and the wider sociological and cultural. It is both deeply spiritual and intellectually satisfying.” —Tom Harpur, former author, journalist, TV host

“Written in lyrical, vibrant prose, Prodigal Daughter is part travelogue and part memoir—a detailed account of findings from her travels to Greece, Bulgaria, Croatia and Macedonia . . . Winner of the 2011 City of Edmonton Prize, Prodigal Daughter is a thought-provoking book.” —Prairie Fire Review of Books

“It may just be her best book to date . . . a shockingly honest and open articulation of a spiritual quest, one that is rich with possibilities.” —Lindy Ledohowski, Canadian Literature

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 21, 2010
• ISBN: 9780888647047

Book preview

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dot.jpg    Prologue

square.jpg   Grade Four class, Delton Elementary School, northeast Edmonton, mid-1950s

I WAS NINE YEARS OLD, seated at a worn wooden desk in a handsome brick school that was much the most important building in this immigrant and blue-collar neighbourhood. My teacher, Miss Clarke, was asking us, kindly, one after another: And where do you come from? No one was Canadian yet, not even those born in Canada. It was understood we all started from some other country. Now it was my turn. I’m Greek, I said.

With precocious subterfuge, a little Ukrainian-Canadian girl had made the link between the onion-domed churches of the Canadian prairie and her source in Byzantium. In that Grade Four moment I was already testifying, through a kind of tapping into a collective memory, that I came from a very large world indeed, the world of eastern Christianity.

Well, perhaps not; rather, I was unwittingly tapping a reservoir of cultural shame. In that multi-ethnic classroom in Edmonton, I was laying desperate claim to an origin that was not Ukrainian, for I already knew, had sensed by osmosis from my western Canadian surroundings, that Ukrainian, or any Slavic, identity was less desirable than most others, although a notch up from the Cree Indians and what we then called the half-breeds. But what could I get away with? There were kids in that classroom who were Ukrainian like me, and Polish, and German, and Dutch. We all knew who the English kids were, and they weren’t us. I knew I couldn’t claim to be Scottish, Irish, or Welsh because they were English too. And that’s when I hit on it. I went to a church that called itself Ukrainian Greek Orthodox. There was no substantial Greek immigration into Edmonton yet (well, there was that radio announcer, Ernie Afaganis, but nobody called him anything but a radio announcer), so all our references to Greeks were to gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus, and heroes who went to the Trojan War.

I’m Greek, I said.

BEFORE SUNDAY SCHOOL, we children sat with our parents upstairs in the church, for the first hour of the Divine Liturgy. The church was named for St. John Chrysostom, the Golden Mouth, Patriarch of Constantinople, the Liturgy’s putative writer, who died in 407. In his icon, he stands in episcopal garb, carrying a Gospel and flanked by the other fourth-century Father-Theologians of the early church: Basil the Great, Metropolitan of Caesarea, and Gregory of Nazianzus, for a time Bishop of Constantinople. In the fourth century, it was all one Church still, Greek and Latin, and these patriarchs commanded all the faithful of West and East. Yet such figures seemed weird and exotic even to me, unnatural, alien, so used was I to the way things were supposed to look in the workaday world. In this world, their bodies had disappeared within the stiff brocade from which their skinny necks emerged, topped by inexpressive faces, mild and joyless.

The Liturgy was celebrated in the modern Ukrainian language, although this was not of much help to me as I didn’t speak the language in any version. We spoke only English at home. Now I can read, in the Pryiatel’ Ditei (prayer book for children), its small pages worn thin at the corners, that, with the priest’s opening utterance, Blessed be the kingdom of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and forever, unto ages of ages, we have the first of many, many repetitions of that triad. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—this was the cue to cross ourselves, in the Orthodox style, thumb, index, and middle fingers bunched up, the hand moving from right to left shoulder. This gesture was one of the first things we learned in Sunday school: it separated us from the Catholics, who used their whole hand to move from left to right. And then we were into the first of the Litanies (Lord have mercy), our signal to sit down. Also included were prayers for Queen Elizabeth II, the government and the armed forces, for our God-beloved and God-protected country, Canada, and for our God-beloved and God-protected ancestral homeland, Ukraine.

St. John’s was the cathedral church, many-domed, cavernous, its ornamentation forever being upgraded (my father would point out the church’s embellishments—banners, stained glass windows, bronze candle stands—with a sarcastic poke in the ribs). The priest officiated way up there in the sanctuary (it was understood that the front pews were reserved for the parish bigwigs, although they were not always present), separated from us by the ornately carved and painted screen of icons, the iconostasis, which shielded the sanctuary and all the mysteries performed within it from our gaze. I stared at it, year in and year out, until these images—eikon = image—of saints, prophets, archangels, martyrs, kings and queens, the Holy Trinity, the annunciatory Angel Gabriel and the girl, Mary, leaning in toward each other seemed like a gallery of relatives lined up for an anniversary photograph on the farm. But through the open doors of the screen I could see Fr. Chomiak moving about in his several layers of gold-and-white vestments, performing mysterious rites at the altar, attended by sacristan and altar boys. All males, of course. Technically, I was one of the God-beloved people, but I would never be admitted into the precinct of the sanctuary, at least not until I had stopped the monthly bleeding.

Later I will learn that the consecrated altar is considered to be the sacred place of Christ’s sacrifice and therefore must be physically separated from the unconsecrated people in the nave. But I saw all kinds of unconsecrated people moving in and out of that space—old men, pimply boys—and I did not yet bleed, yet I stood meekly at the door opening to the sacristy, offering up the basket in which the congregation had slipped their loose change for the Children’s Collection, not daring to pollute even with my gaze that men’s clubhouse that lies beyond the space—the world—in which men and women mingle, though I sensed furtively the gold plate, the brocades, the beeswax, the box of matches, the overcoats. Decades later this prohibition is still so strong in me that, even utterly alone in rustic Greek chapels and miles away from town or village, I allow myself only a peek behind the faded cloth that hangs from the humble iconostasis, cobwebs shielding the sanctuary from me.

In the pews I sat with my father, the great skeptic of our family, the reader of history books and the thinker of what ifs, who would whisper flippant asides during the course of the sermon, even though he was the son of pious immigrants and was himself a faithful servant of the Church, who departed weekly on mysterious errands having to do with Boards, Consistories, and Assemblies of the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church of Canada, Edmonton division.

At fifteen, I announced to my parents one Sunday morning while we were all dressing for church that I did not believe in God and would no longer accompany them to church services. My mother said that I was far too young to decide any such thing, and that seems to have been that. There were many more Sundays of church: the, to me, interminable Liturgies; unintelligible sequence of kneeling, standing, and sitting; mournful choral music of the Slavonic service, no musical instruments allowed. I envied my Protestant friends who were in and out of church in an hour, having enjoyed themselves thoroughly with cheerful hymns you could tap your toes to, jolly organ interludes, and sermons about good citizenship.

On Sundays we were no longer in the Anglo world, which was the world of Protestants in all their bewildering variety, though I lumped them all together, especially the Anglicans, as English. They were the public face of religious belief in western Canada well into the 1960s, along with the Roman Catholics, but RCS (as we called them) had their own schools where they were taught by nuns (penguins) and said a lot of Latin mumbo-jumbo, so they were not quite normal even though public.

I knew much about the non-Ukrainian Christians—what their churches looked like inside and out, what they sang in there, what their weddings were like, how their Reverends and Pastors dressed, how they celebrated Christmas: they built crèches and ate roast turkey. But they needed to know nothing about me (or about Jews in their synagogues, for that matter, or Muslims in their mosques, Edmonton’s Al-Rashid, the first in Canada). After all, how would they learn it? There were no public texts except the annual and obligatory story in the Edmonton Journal about our fellow Edmontonians who observe the Julian calendar, accompanied by a photo of the mother of the household in her embroidered blouse setting the table with the traditional twelve dishes, meatless and milkless. The stage had been set for the dogged representation of Ukrainians as pyrohy eaters.

On December 18, St. Nicholas Day in the Julian calendar, we were packed into the church basement along with all the other kids for a St. Nicholas Day concert that climaxed with the arrival of the Saint himself in his episcopal vestments and crown borrowed from the vestry, looking just like his icon. He carried a great sack from which he dispensed gifts, harassed all the while by a cackling chortyk, a little devil in black-face, who maligned us all, good or bad. There was always the chance that St. Nicholas would believe him and put our beribboned gift back into his sack, leaving us reduced to tears of mortification.

St. Nicholas is a much-loved saint of the Eastern Church, the kindly Bishop who threw gold into the bedroom of the three daughters of a poor man to save them from prostitution, rescued three innocents from death by decapitation, saved Patriarch Anastasius from drowning, returned a son who had been kidnapped by Arab slavers to his family. I found myself in a tumult of confused desires when I considered this stately Bishop of Myra—bald and grey-bearded and wrinkle-browed, who never made an appearance outside the church but who somehow represented how we did Christmas—and that other herald of the Christmas season, Santa Claus—the fat man in the red snowsuit waving at us from his float in the Santa Claus parade trundling down Jasper Avenue, his cheeks and nose, like ours, pink and prickly with frost. Later, he was transported to his throne in the Hudson’s Bay Company department store and tilted his head not for our prayers but for our wish list of childish goodies that we were pretty sure he would deliver, no questions asked. He was also popularly known as jolly St. Nick, but I never made the connection. Jolly St. Nick was English. It was as though all public space was secular, while Ukrainian Orthodox space was reserved for devotion.

I sensed that, among my relatives and my parents’ friends who went to church, there was a kind of piety, or at least a seriousness about the enterprise, both the city women, in exuberantly flowered Easter hats—my mother in a broad-brimmed, white-straw boater trimmed with navy blue silk around the crown, tilted rakishly now that I think of it—who prepared the elaborate wicker baskets filled with Easter foods for blessing, and also my relatives on the farm, the men who took wives and children to church but themselves stood outside the building, leaning on their wagons, smoking, and talking about grain prices. My childhood Confessions were always a bafflement as I did not understand what the aged, spidery, unilingual priest from the Old Country was saying to me, but he and I endured, his brocade stole laid carefully over my bowed head as I whispered my repentance for not having always obeyed Mamo and Tato. Every Sunday a tiny black-scarved crone, bent over at a right angle from her waist in permanent paralysis, kissed and stroked the icons laid on the altar in a routine of Old Country veneration. I would encounter her again in Russian novels.

I am told my paternal baba was a woman of great piety, although I have no memory of any particular instance of it, unless it were her remark that her one wish at the end of her life was to die when it was warm, for how were the poor gravediggers to dig her grave in the blasted heath that is the Canadian parkland in the winter? (She died one February.) My paternal grandfather died in the 1930s, before my parents were married, but I did come across, in the cigar box with the hinged lid that so fascinated me, a small black and white photograph of his funeral: it was taken outside the church in Vegreville, my father was one of the pallbearers, hatless though stout in his winter coat, my grandfather laid out in the open coffin, his hands crossed over his dark-suited chest, his face bearing a large moustache. Fortunately, Baba had borne a family of sons; she did not have to sell the family farm.

Is this what constituted our piety, a church for the rites of passage, the twelve dishes of Christmas Eve for the twelve Apostles, a bowl of crudely painted Easter eggs on the table for the Resurrection, and a prayer at the end of life not to be a burden to anyone, not even in one’s coffin?

My maternal grandparents were something else altogether. What I know of their religious attitudes I know from my mother’s familiar anecdotes, as well as from what I sensed in their home: they never went to church and hung no icons. Arguments between my father and my dido, my grandfather, were as often as not provoked by the brandishing of their respective newspapers, the Ukrainian Voice versus Farm and Life. Dido was not my biological grandfather—that man had died in his early thirties from pneumonia contracted from one walk too many on the long, dark, cold road home from the rending plant in east Edmonton. Dido was his younger brother, a bug-eyed, gristly bearded man in coveralls and long johns who spoke no English and who had married, as was expected, his brother’s pregnant widow. She lost that child, but ever after it was Dido’s bitter complaint that once more in life he had inherited another man’s hand-me-downs, including my mother. As the story goes, he forced Baba, whose best subject in four years of school in Galicia had been religion, to give up her Bible, whereupon he placed it in the outhouse. For this was the same householder who spat invective against priests and hung large portraits of Lenin and Stalin in the front room.

He frightened me, this angry, unhappy, half-literate man who bore no relationship to the world I was growing up in. His alienation from it made me cringe.

Dido read magazines from Soviet Ukraine, the ones that Canadians made fun of, their ink-bleeding pages of photos of brawny Russki workers on collective farms in love not with buxom dairymaids but with their tractors, pride and joy of the Red October factory. I remember snickering at these smudgy photo-spreads myself, ruddy-cheeked collective farm workers beaming with pleasure, the women in battalions in the beet fields, brandishing hoes, while the men sat enthroned on the tractors. I had a vague awareness that some Ukrainian-Canadians had acquitted themselves well in political protests during the Dirty Thirties and had even got themselves killed for their efforts (although it would be years before I read the whole story of Ukrainian-Canadian militancy in the Communist Party of Canada), but the only story my pro-Communist grandfather seemed to have is that he was scooped up accidentally by the police in Edmonton who were breaking up a demonstration, and landed in Fort Saskatchewan jail, terrified and humiliated and bewildered and eventually extricated and brought home by Baba, whose own emotions are not accounted for.

This was the Left—or rather the Communism—routinely denounced in the church as the ideology that had fuelled the revolution that had torn down the churches and monasteries of Soviet Ukraine and killed their priests and nuns or sent them to Siberia, had enslaved the Ukrainian people in a godless collectivity, without hope or agency, and was now spreading its tentacles in the New World.

The arguments failed to convince me, but I knew how to interpret the emotions and body language in which they were delivered: short men in bad haircuts and carefully preserved suits, DPS in fact, displaced persons who spoke English only under duress and with a thick accent embarrassing to hear, who, I was told, had been citizens of substance in pre-war western Ukraine (then still part of Poland), educated professionals (or at least schoolteachers) now reduced in Canada to work as school janitors. I would creep past them in my own schools, casting a guilty glance into their little cubicles in the basement, where they sat among their mops and pails, as if we shared the secret fact of their lost prestige.

My mother married into this world—All that Orthodox claptrap and folderol, as she put it years later. Here’s what she had still to learn: how to address the priests and their wives, how to prepare the home for the New Year’s blessing by holy water, whether to offer carollers tea or rye whisky, how to be useful in the Women’s Association. She would make thousands of holubtsi for weddings, serve at the weddings, do the dishes: my sister and I would sit at the long, white-clothed banquet tables in the National Hall, kicking each other under the linen skirts as my mother scurried back and forth between tables and kitchen, her apron her badge of belonging, her hair damp from the steam coming from the cauldrons of water boiling for the pyrohy. When I thought about this later, I regretted that by leaving the other Hall (the Farm-Labour Temple), my mother had effectively deprived me of an interesting legacy. I could have had a parent who marched in May Day parades, belted out labour songs, and thrilled to speeches by Ukrainian-Canadian Communist militants, who memorized proletarian verses by Ukrainian poets and saluted the hammer-and-sickle flag and…whatever subversive or at least alternative culture was incubated away from the churches.

Instead, in the church basement, as we sat in our rows at the tables now cleared of the bowls of holubtsi and pyrohy, and the priest and his wife and the deacon sat at the head table facing us, up would stand this small, taut figure; this school janitor, beside the head table, in his lovingly pressed suit and in his own language, would become transformed into a tribune of a people. As a teenager, he had seen his home and family and neighbours engulfed by war, ground between two titanic armies, yet he had taken up his puny arms—a hunting rifle, a confession of faith, a suppressed anthem—and lost everything, only to land in our Ukrainian-Canadian midst, with me, scowling and fidgeting and yawning, complaining I was bored.

Edmonton 1960: One afternoon, I wandered out into the backyard where my father was seated in the lawn chair reading—I myself had been reading Aldous Huxley—and asked him point blank if there was a God. He took the pipe out of his mouth: Is there a God? If there is, He’s a principle of energy, of the eternal cycles of nature and of the cosmos… There was more, I think—the I Am of God as a mathematical theorem. Was this an answer?

As a teenager, what had been pulling at my heartstrings were issues of what we now call social justice. I did not yet suspect that I might be called on to act in the world, but Lord, I believed.

I cheered Fidel Castro, I read George Orwell with deep conviction, Anne Frank’s story crushed my heart, and Audrey Hepburn’s self-sacrifice as a waifish nurse-nun alluring in her virginal vestments inspired the ideal of the unmarried childless life. Hungarian refugees, tossed up in my elementary school, haunted me with images of their desperate flight from Russian tanks in the cobblestoned streets of the Old Country behind the Iron Curtain, as did the display of United Nations’ black and white photographs in the windows of the Hudson’s Bay Company store on Jasper Avenue of the wretched camps of the Palestinians dispossessed of their land. Stories of tormented animals left me distraught, and I mourned the untimely deaths of the UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold and American President John Kennedy with paroxysms of real grief. As soon as I was able to conceptualize the meaning of what had happened at Hiroshima, of Jim Crow laws in the southern United States, and of pass laws in South Africa, I knew that the world I wanted to live in was the world of impassioned reason, as represented by arguments, texts, and exposés, all in the service of righting wrongs by the power of language out and about in the world.

As a part-time hippy in the 1960s, in Seattle, San Francisco, Toronto, London, I lived among people who, home from the anti-war demonstration, sat in lotus position during solemn rituals of getting stoned. They seemed demonstrably more evolved than me, outside any particular Christian practices, so I became interested in the books they kept in their Afghan tote bags: Alan Watts’s Nature, Man and Woman, Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, and the I Ching, around which we gathered to throw Chinese coins, over and over and over again, until we decoded something that made sense. Leonard Cohen’s first album, the one with the image of St. Kateri Tekakwitha in flames, provided the soundtrack.

I am impressed now by how many more hours I devoted to the cryptic runes of an exotic Asian sage—he who crosses the great water knows good fortune—than I was ever prepared to give to the sages of my own tradition. St. John Chrysostom, St. John of the Golden Mouth, for instance, Bishop of Constantinople, who wrote in the fifth century: When you discover the door of your heart, you discover the gate of heaven—which I now have written on a Post-It note at my desk, as it seems immeasurably more helpful.

For a couple of months of Sundays, I made my way over to the Bethune Centre in Toronto to join a reading circle poring over the classics of Marxism-Leninism. To my own library I added the cheap paperbacks of New Left critiques of the world order, and Malcolm X, Regis Debray, and eventually Germaine Greer and Kate Millett from feminist reading groups. I had made my getaway from the Ukrainian-Canadian ghetto of my childhood and headlong into what could be called modernity, the conviction that the enlightened mind is a capacious enough organ to enable me to live life as a good and just person, leavened by pleasurable sensation. It had nothing to do with what went on in churches, unless it were a radical church somewhere in the Third World or American South, or the places where the anti-war Catholics, such as the Berrigan brothers, Daniel and Philip, prayed. I knew nothing of the persecuted of the churches of Soviet Ukraine; it was her martyred intellectuals and artists who aroused me. History, not God, was keeping the accounts.

For Ukrainians to deny the Byzantine, the Greek, is to perform a kind of suicide, it’s to pronounce oneself illegitimate, to humiliate oneself. To reject the Greek in one’s name is to renounce one’s own father and mother, it’s to betray our entire history and one’s nation![1]

—ILARION, Metropolitan of Canada, 1953

It is true that while I was growing up, the church my family attended was known as St. John’s Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church. But we did not for a moment confuse ourselves with Greek Greeks. For one thing, we couldn’t understand their language (although much of our lofty liturgical and theological lexicon was a literal translation of the Greek) and for another the Orthodox Church among the Ukrainian-Canadians was a production site of intense ethnic, even national, Ukrainian pride.

But, outside the church, who were we, we Ukrainians of the Canadian prairie? Take the city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, for instance, where 180-some disgruntled adherents of the Greek Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches, not to mention disenchanted socialists and Presbyterians, met in the summer of 1918 to establish the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church of Canada, a momentous event widely seen as the rebirth of Ukrainian Orthodoxy outside its homeland on the free lands of Canada. Saskatoon’s Holy Trinity Cathedral, located in what used to be a mainly East European working-class neighbourhood, now raises its coppery bulbous domes over the mainly Aboriginal so-called Core Neighbourhood: Goodbye Dnipro Café, Hello White Buffalo Youth Lodge. The church has a very good choir, well-executed Byzantine-style frescoes, and a youngish priest who grew up on a Manitoba farm and decided to join the priesthood the day his boss on the oil rig in Alberta wouldn’t let him go home for Ukrainian Easter. I learn this over coffee in the church hall, where a bulletin board announces Orthodox Youth Missions to Greece and volunteers are setting up the tables for tonight’s community bingo game.

But Ukrainian-Canadians have become more complicated than this benign image would suggest. Formerly and officially deeply grateful to the institutions of Canada for inviting us in, giving us a break on homestead land, sending our kids to school, and assimilating us into Anglo-Canadian culture, and, in the nick of time, promulgating the Multiculturalism Act, we also became victims, that excruciating condition of mixed shame and indignation—the shame and indignation of being among those interned as enemy aliens during the First World War, of the everyday epithets and gestures directed against us, Bohunks, and the stereotyping in the press as either Reds, Commies, pinkos, or nationalists, fascists, and anti-Semites. All of it reinforced our resentment that our historical traumas, rehearsed in ethnic rituals of communal remembrance, were somehow discreditable.

In a recent photo in a community newspaper, of dancers performing at a Ukrainian arts festival in Toronto, I see both good and bad Ukrainians. Good Ukrainians do not make anyone uncomfortable: the six smiling young women in ravishing costumes of heavily embroidered red velvet, their lovely heads bearing wreaths and ribbons, project innocence, laughter, beauty, the idealized village maidens of universal folklore. The men’s group of dancers typifies the bad Ukraine: eight youthful males in Cossack military dress (long blue tunics and ballooning red trousers) hoist rifles with the blue-and-yellow national flag unfurled on bayonets. We see heroic soldiers defending the people from their oppressors. The rest of the world sees rabid violence unleashed on the hapless others—Poles, Jews, Russians.

I have traced the palpable borders of Slavs’ anxiety about whether they are truly Western, inside Europe. Here is where Europe ends, I’ve been told, in Zagreb, Belgrade, Prague, Warsaw, Lviv. Over there, among their immediate neighbours to the east (Turks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Russians, Tatars), it ends.

Ukrainians, for example, are not European-Europeans. They never had a Renaissance or Reformation or Industrial Revolution (as these were experienced in capital letters in the West). They lived mainly in small towns and villages. Jews, Russians, and Poles, and assimilated intelligentsia, were the Europeans in their cities. The notion that Ukrainian heritage is somehow Eurocentric, that dirty word of the culture wars of the late twentieth century, is misplaced: the centre of which Europe, exactly? The frontiers of Europe have been sensationally porous, letting in Huns, Mongols, Tatars, Pechenegs, Slavs, Ottoman Turks, and have shifted in slithery lines from Constantinople/Istanbul all the way west to Vienna and then way east to Moscow or way west to Moorish Spain. Turkish muezzins have sung from minarets in Bosnia. Turks rounded up Ukrainian peasants for the slave markets of Crimea. Tatars waved their sabres at the miraculous icon of Our Lady of Czestochowa.

I call this Euroeccentricity.

In the post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, I found myself in profound identification with the resurfaced peoples of the East-of-West, but in a cringing sort of way. These were my near relations who stood within the West’s gaze once more as denizens of exotic or sinister hinterlands: Balkan, Byzantine, Slavic, Cyrillic, Orthodox, Asian.

After centuries of disapproval if not outright contempt as Byzantines, Asiatics, and Communists, here they were again, spilling over into Western consciousness as the new barbarians at the gates. Fired up by ancient ethnic hatred, they stormed from village to village; full of vodka and slivovic, they cleansed the ancestral lands of strangers; they drunkenly brandished mountaineers’ rifles, aiming them at their neighbours across the fence, with the blessings of a scruffy Orthodox priest with soup stains on his cassock, and a fat wife.

FOR SOME YEARS NOW I have been reading topics in what I think of as Where does Europe end? Full of anticipation, I pick up a new book on interlibrary loan, which seems hardly to have been cracked open. It is The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity, by Richard Fletcher, of the University of York. He writes in the Preface: The scope of the book is confined for the most part to western, Latin and Roman Christendom. Fletcher includes the western Slavs, Czechs, and Poles, for they appear in Latin texts. But, the history of eastern, Greek or Orthodox Christendom is not my concern, let alone the history of those exotic Christian communities, Ethiopic, Indian and Nestorian, which lay beyond the eastern Mediterranean hinterland.[2]

A scholar may write about whatever he chooses. But I am struck by the fact that this book, written in 1993, in that dismal decade of wars and social collapses featuring Europeans of Orthodox Christendom, even these sensational events in former Yugoslavia and in former Soviet Union a mere fifty years after the Second World War, could not drag the West’s hinterland into scholarly view. My Concise Oxford Dictionary defines hinterland as district behind coast or river’s banks, freq. with suggestion of sparse population or inferior civilization.

There you have it: the cultural and spiritual zone to which the Ukrainian-Canadian Archbishop Ilarion exhorted me to swear my loyalty—my source in the Christian Empire of Byzantium—is outside the concern of the interpreters of our shared European space. Yet, after the fall of Rome in the fifth century, for the next thousand years, Byzantium was civilization: it radiated wealth, power, and splendour around the eastern Mediterranean world from its home in Constantinople.

In the West’s sense of itself, the eastern Mediterranean is a parenthetical text, a bibliographical reference, an inferior culture at the borderland of the normal (that let alone). I read this now as a wound, an insult, an aggression against me. I startle myself. I did not know that I was taking it so personally.

In a review of Pushing Time Away, Peter Singer’s memoir of his grandfather in Jewish Vienna, Jeremy Adler writes, For a generation after the Second World War it was difficult to discuss one’s German-Jewish origins or the Holocaust without embarrassment. Even children whose families had been murdered in the camps found it hard to speak about their loss….Today, by contrast, a scarred identity earns almost universal respect.[3] If you’re by descent a Jew or Armenian or Cambodian or Rwandan, perhaps. And if, like Singer, your European forebears lived in a city where it was not difficult to earn an income sufficient for a comfortable apartment with a live-in maid. Such people left behind memorabilia—Singer found family papers and letters in his aunt’s home in Melbourne. Where do you find the letters and family papers of Galician peasants who vanished, speechless, behind Soviet borders, or who tossed up equally speechless on the margins of Canadian enterprise?

On Sundays during my youth, I had stared at an icon that hung on the wall to the left of the sanctuary. It showed two people, a man and a woman in Slavic medieval dress and wearing crowns, with the letters of their