"Beautiful, but everything is Russian": Kyiv media call for transferring St. Nicholas Church "on the water" to OCU ownership

The Kyiv media are provoking a possible transfer of the Kyiv Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, which is actually located above the waters of the Dnipro River, to the OCU. The media claim that the St. Nicholas Church “on the water”, built in memory of Russian and Ukrainian sailors and navigators of all times, is “detached from the Ukrainian capital” and is a place dedicated not to Ukrainian tradition but to Russian history and saints. The article was published on the Big Kyiv website.

“There is a service inside. About two dozen people have gathered, icons, candles, women wearing headscarves. It is noticeable that everyone here is a friend, because when you enter, they look at the ‘guest’: who is it? The prayer service is conducted in Russian. Not in Old Slavonic with a Russian accent (as they used to say in the Kyiv Cave Monastery, that people just learned as best they could, so they pronounce some things in Russian). No, everything here is clearly in Russian, neither for better nor for worse. The priest reads out the saints he prays to during the service: Volodymyr the Great, the Holy Fathers of the Caves, Matronushka (Moscow), Xenia of St. Petersburg, St. Nicholas. There were also others who, unlike the saints of the Kyiv Cave Monastery, are of clearly Russian origin,” – the correspondent writes.

The author adds that it would be nice to transfer St. Nicholas Church of the UOC to the OCU so that the parishioners of the church could pray in Ukrainian, but “people are not ready yet.”

“You may say that in order to change this situation, parishes must move from the UOC to the OCU, but people are not ready. But think about it: is it difficult to make a strong-willed decision and remember the saints of this region or others, who are and were many all over the world, not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg, during a service in the center of Kyiv? Is it possible to start praying in Ukrainian while standing on the Dnipro River? If they do not, it means they do not have such a desire,” – the author of the article added.

Earlier, the odious head of the Volyn Diocese of the OCU, Mikhail Zinkevich, spoke about which churches and monasteries he would be able to take away from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Volyn thanks to Law No. 8371 adopted by the Verkhovna Rada. According to Zinkevich, the state will transfer one of the cathedrals and several monasteries, which are architectural monuments, to the ownership of the Volyn Diocese of the OCU.