Easter steps outside churches

By Vestnik Kavkaza

Celebrations of Easter will step beyond the territories of churches and monasteries for the first time this year. More than 200 Easter events will take place in parks, museums, cinemas and cultural centers.

“A big Easter festival will take place near churches of our city. In most cases it will happen on May 5th; some events – on May 10th and 11th, as well as on May 12,” Prior Pyotr (Yeremeyev), head of St. John the Evangelist Russian Orthodox University, says. “Along with wonderful cultural actions in churches, splendid festivals devoted to Easter will be arranged in parks and cultural centers of Moscow – musical and concert performances, the table of peace, the festival of Easter eggs, and so on. The beautiful and pleasant language of secular culture will tell about the modern life of the Orthodox society of our country, our capital.”

“The idea of this festival this year is to involve a lot of people so that the festival would be pan-city. It should involve not only the religious people who will come to all churches on Easter, but also those who are interested in the events happening in churches on the day and are ready to participate in this pan-city event in a convenient form for them,” Vakhtang Kipshidze, head of the information and analysis center of the Synodal Information Department, states.

“Last year on the Moscow City Day we and the Culture Department arranged several concerts within the territories of Moscow churches which went on to the streets,” Prior Pyotr remembers. “We saw that the church's culture, which has various directions – instrumental culture, photo exhibitions, choirs – involved a lot of people. People who didn’t come to churches, but passed by, saw the space of the spiritual culture expressed in an available language that night. That’s when the idea of holding the same festival on Easter was born. The festival should show people the richness of the Eastern Orthodox culture, peoples’ households, customs, including a part of the divine service culture. That is why this year church spaces of the Easter festival in Moscow City are available for citizens, rather than church yards’ territories or church spaces which are not available for religious and non-religious people who pass by a church. The yards are open for the city. There is only one exception – two monasteries, including our Vysokopetrovsky Monastery at Petrovka Street, these spaces will be closed to the city.

However, we know that a lot of people come to watch the monastery’s life on Easter. Many of them do not enter churches, but walk around the monastery’s territory. We will introduce an amazing cultural program for them – children's contests, egg painting, nice choir ensembles will perform to them an interesting and simple church program. It’s won’t bother the church’s life, it won’t disturb divine services in churches and monasteries, but will enable taking outside the church space and all richness and diversity of the Christian culture of our peoples and our capital. The idea of the festival is to hold an accessible, beautiful, understandable city festival of Orthodox Easter. The Church is only a partner and a participant in this, we help the Culture Department to express the richness of Christian Easter through the secular cultural language.”