The 21st volume of the daily, which a Czech journalist writes for readers of the List of News directly from Moscow
It was Orthodox Easter on Sunday. Somehow I don’t enjoy it here in Moscow. So I don’t even experience the Christian ones. I can’t knit blemishes, instead I make a treat. This is my bond with Czech Easter. A week later, it’s time for an Orthodox sweetheart. There is a ball on the table – a dough chimney topped with white icing and garnished with decoration. It looks like a panettone, it tastes like a panettone, but you better not tell the Russians.
Passover is eaten with a ball – an unbaked cheesecake, which is left in shape overnight to have the right shape and an orthodox cross is imprinted in white, and the letters Ch and V hide an Easter greeting: Christos voskrese! (Czech Christ is risen from the dead!)
The Passover form aroused passions at home. The old one was lost and the hastily ordered new one did not come in time. And when we stuffed sweet cottage cheese into the Made in Russia mold, the plastic walls became clear. The Orthodox cross did not appear and it was a mess.
Ball and pasha, Easter dishes of Orthodoxy.
I enjoy the piety of the Russians. I don’t mean it badly. But for me, as an agnostic, it’s an interesting cultural-identification phenomenon.
When I traveled to the Russian North Caucasus, the locals always asked me how I felt about it. They often couldn’t understand that this was an issue I wasn’t dealing with. Islam is a key part of social life in Dagestan or Chechnya. When someone there wants to talk about my faith, I answer that I respect all religions, but I have not yet found my way to God. And it’s calm.
It is more difficult with the Orthodox Russians. Especially around Easter or Christmas. “The Hussite nation and do not believe in God? That is not possible, “I was shocked recently by the attitude of the Czechs towards the religion of my friend. He found it insane that only a quarter of people in the Czech Republic profess their faith.
To give me my Orthodox acquaintance peace, I found my favorite Orthodox saint. Saint Seraphim of Sarovsky. Father Seraphim lived as a hermit. In the holy pictures he is often depicted feeding a bear bread. He became famous, among other things, as a miracle worker and a prophet.
And why did I just choose Serafim? It embodies what the Russians like. He was canonized at the instigation of the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II. The Bolsheviks wanted to burn his remains in the so-called Pulpit of Ungodliness – a crematorium near the nationalized Don Monastery, but miraculously they were found after the collapse of the USSR.
The rediscovery of Serafim’s remains is a harbinger of a renewal of Russia’s power. And Sarov, where the holy man was hermit, is the birthplace of Soviet nuclear weapons. In short, Seraphim of Sarov is one Russian cliché next to another.
The Russian faith is sometimes full of paradoxes. I don’t care why popes sanctify Russian rockets and Russian astronauts take icons into space. After all, Gagarin proved that God does not exist. The Soviet ideologues put it this way.
I do not understand how a splinter from the Holy Cross placed on the Moscow cruiser was to protect a Russian warship from sinking. But so be it.
An unnamed Russian presenter sent me a photo at Easter. She is with her daughter in the church and holding candles in her hands. “Peace and goodness to all of us,” she wished me.
That is the message that makes sense. For believers and non-believers. If only Russia would stick to it.
