Orthodox Poles Visit Shrine Despite Destructive Fire

Orthodox worshipers climbed the Holy Mountain this summer in their annual pilgrimage, but the wooden chapel that greeted the faithful for nearly three centuries was gone, burned to the ground.

The tiny chapel and its priceless icons were destroyed July 12. A month later, the joy of the annual pilgrimage to Grabarka was cloaked with grief and suspicion.

A convict on a five-day leave from prison was charged with setting the fire because he could not break into the chapel to steal a gold cross.

Priests and their followers are troubled not only by the destruction of the Orthodox faith’s holiest shrine in Poland, but by fear that the motivation was darker than robbery.

“It was a blow at the heart of Orthodoxy . . . aimed to destroy us,” said one priest, who would not give his name. “Most people think the only religion in Poland should be Catholic.”

There have been several attacks on Orthodox churches in Poland, a nation of 38 million people that is 93% Roman Catholic.

St. Mary’s was the sixth Orthodox church burned in five years, the government newspaper Rzeczpospolita reported.

Keston College, a British organization that monitors religious freedom, also has expressed concern about attacks on Orthodox institutions in Poland.

Orthodoxy holds many tenets similar to Roman Catholicism, but rejects the primacy of the Pope. It is Poland’s largest religious minority, with an estimated 800,000 followers, many of them ethnic Byelorussians from the eastern provinces.

During the three-day Orthodox pilgrimage, up to 60,000 people climbed to this village 75 miles west of Warsaw and 15 from the Soviet border.

The spring-fed waters of the Holy Mountain, in reality a small hill, are supposed to have cured a prophet’s followers of plague in 1710.

Pilgrims, some climbing on their knees, carried wooden crosses to be planted on the hilltop amid the thousands of weathered, moss-covered offerings of previous years, many of which were charred by the fire.

“This is a special year, one when we are all living through this great loss,” said Eugeniusz Zabrodski, a priest from nearby Drohiczyn.

“Looking at the burned wood, and the altar where I used to say Divine Liturgy, I could only wonder how anyone could do this,” he said.

On Sunday, Aug. 19, the observances culminated in the consecration of the cornerstone of a new church.

Collection boxes for the building fund dotted the hill. Donations from around the world totaled $8,420 and the Polish Senate, which condemned the arson, contributed $5,260.

There is controversy about what kind of church to build.

“Some think it should be wood just like it was, but others want to take advantage of the opportunity and build something much larger,” Zabrodski said.

For now, services are conducted at a makeshift wooden altar dwarfed by towering pines with singed branches.

The happy chatter of pilgrims washing in the waters below reached the hushed reverence of the shrine. Elderly women, their heads covered by scarfs in the Orthodox tradition, circled the altar on their knees.

Many faithful spent the night kneeling in prayer. The Divine Liturgy, in Old Church Slavonic, was conducted virtually without cease from 6 p.m. Saturday until Sunday afternoon.

Poland’s Orthodox Church is independent of Russian Orthodoxy, to which it lost an estimated 4.5 million followers after World War II, when the Soviet Union annexed eastern Poland.

Both churches descend from the Orthodox faith that developed in Constantinople after the Great Schism of 1054.

At Grabarka, worshipers and clergy communicated in a polyglot of Polish, Russian, Byelorussian and Slovak, reflecting the mix of peoples who feel the tug of the shrine year after year.

“We came here to get our strength, because this is where the Orthodox are,” said Ania, a 20-year-old law student from Bialystok.