BYZANTINE ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY AND ITS ATTITUDE TO UKRAINE AT THE TIME AND AFTER VOLODYMYR’S BAPTISM

Abstract

The article explores an ambivalent attitude of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to Ukraine from Volodymyr’s baptism of 988 on. In the late 10th century, under the rulership of the emperor Basil II from the Macedonian dynasty, Byzantium was in its heyday. It spreaded Christianity in the form of Byzantine Orthodoxy like a suzerain to its vassals or even simpler: there are Greeks, the rest are barbarians. Unfortunately, unequal attitude of Constantinople to Slavs of the Balkans and Eastern Europe continued even after the seizure of the city by Turks and its renaming into Stambul. A newly established form of relations between the Church-Mother and the Churh-Daughter was non-Christian in its essence. Ukrainian Church felt and still feels this: no Ukrainian Orthodox Church is recognised by the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the actual Patriarch Bartholomew I Arhondonis . Such a situation indicates the need of the radical reform of the relations between the Orthodox Churches all over the world, primarily the abolition of non-Christian, non-Evangelical principle of ‘recognition’ or ‘non-recognition’ and the division of Churches into maternal and filial ones.
Key words: the Patriarchate of Constantinople, Byzantium, rite, faith, religion, Greeks, “the Third Rome”