Obedience

Once there served a young sexton in a church. He was zealous in obedience and tried to get blessing for everything. One day, the dean charged him with bell-ringing before the service. The sexton immediately asked for blessing and went to the bell tower. A few minutes later the dean noticed that he had given the sexton the keys not to a big old lock, hanging on the door of the belfry, but to his new "Toyota".

He expected the careless novice to come back, but the church bell started ringing followed by change-ringing.

When the bell-ringer returned, they checked the keys. They were to the foreign car. The door to the bell tower was locked.

Later, the curious made several attempts to unlock the bell-tower with the keys to the dean’s car, but in vain. Probably they did not ask for blessing...

Triumph of Orthodoxy – why this feast belongs to artists

There is a small icon in the British Museum – just thirty-seven centimeters high. It is from this modest board that one should begin speaking about what happened in March 843.

Buried alive: How hegumen Athanasius outwitted kings and Jesuits

He was killed three times – defrocked, put in shackles, and shot. We reconstruct the chronicle of the saint's feat based on documents.

Stories about the early Church: The state of clergy in the first centuries

Sources from this period present a rather mixed picture of the state of the clergy. To form a clearer understanding of it, let us examine three aspects: education, morality, and material support.

The mathematics of a knot: why the prayer rope remains a silent weapon

An object a passerby might mistake for decoration is given to a monk at his tonsure as a spiritual sword. What lies hidden in the nine interweavings of a single knot?

Silver candlesticks: How mercy becomes the price of a soul’s salvation

We often think of forgiveness as an easy gesture – a light motion of the heart, a simple “it’s fine,” a quick letting go. But a scene from Victor Hugo’s novel reveals a different truth: another person’s freedom always costs something. And the coin of that purchase is very often our own silver.

Brotherhoods: A network against the empire

In 1596, Orthodoxy in Ukraine was declared “dead.” But while elites were drifting into Catholic cathedrals, ordinary townsmen built a structure that outplayed both empire and Jesuits.