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Orthodox Christmas: Conflicts and celebrations

© Brian J Požun

On 7 January, Orthodox Christians in Central and Eastern Europe and throughout the world celebrate Christmas. Christians of the Russian and Serbian Churches as well as the monks of Mount Athos in Greece celebrate Christmas according to the old Julian calendar. Other Churches, including those of Greece and Bulgaria, have switched to the Gregorian calendar and celebrate the holiday 13 days earlier, on 25 December.

[In 2000] , more than ten thousand flooded Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity in the West Bank to celebrate Christmas, but [in 2001] the open conflict between Israelis and Palestinians kept the crowds away.

There were crowds in the Chechen capital of Grozny, however Orthodox Christmas was observed in the city's near-ruined church. Hundreds of people crowded into the church, which was decorated with fir trees from Northern Russia. Fireworks were set off in the evening, and despite the ever-tense atmosphere there, the holiday passed peacefully.

The situation was drastically different elsewhere. In Slovenia, thousands of Orthodox Christians attended Christmas liturgy at Ljubljana's Cathedral of SS Cyril and Methodius. In the Czech Republic, the holiday was also peacefully observed. There are several Orthodox churches in the country, including the Cathedral of SS Cyril and Methodius in Prague and the Cathedral of St Vaclav in Brno.

Estonia: rocky start to the holiday season

The Christmas season in the region got off to a rocky start when the leaders of 15 of the 16 Eastern Orthodox Churches met on 24 December at the headquarters of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in Istanbul. The only one who did not attend was the Russian Patriarch, Aleksej II.

The Russian Orthodox Church-the world's largest-has been feuding with the Ecumenical Patriarch, the largely-ceremonial head of the Eastern Orthodox Church, throughout the 1990s over jurisdictional claims to the thousands of Orthodox Christians in the former republics of the Soviet Union. The situation has been aggravated in the last several years by events in Estonia.

Hedging a schism between the two Churches that reached its boiling point in 1996, the Moscow Patriarchate reached an agreement with the Ecumenical Patriarch whereby individual parishes in Estonia could choose whether they would answer to the hierarchy of Moscow or Constantinople.

Estonia is home to about 50,000 Orthodox Christians-of these about 30,000 are ethnic Russians.

Moscow viewed a visit by Bartholomew to Estonia in October as a breach of the agreement, and the dispute flared up once again, causing in Aleksej II to boycott the 24 December meeting.

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