Travelling east on minor roads, we cross the former boundary of East Prussia and slowly the landscape changes. The village churches in this one-time German territory of Ostpreußen hardly differ from those we know so well in Berlin’s rural hinterland. There is a familiar mix of coniferous and deciduous woodland, interspersed here and there by lakes, their still waters often fringed by reed beds. Two deer stand by the side of the road, their knowing eyes monitoring the occasional passing tractor or car.
There are Prussian-style red brick barns and tumbledown houses constructed in brick and solid dark-brown wood. Our old map shows German place names that don’t feature on modern signposts. One-time Hohenstein changed to become Olsztynek, while German Ortelsburg has become Polish Szczytno.
We slip ever deeper into the forests. Mushroom gatherers sit patiently by the roadside, many looking in anticipation at us as we approach, always hopeful that we might stop and buy the rich pickings they have found in the forest. We pass the fierce fences which hide a remote military facility. In a nearby village, Stare Kiejkuty, locals talk of night-time comings and goings. “It was a clandestine CIA detention centre,” says one man. “Codename Quartz. The Americans might still be there for all I know. That’s where they rounded up suspects after 9/11,” mutters the man who doesn’t want to say more and settles down for a late afternoon beer by the side of the village pond.
These remote Polish borderlands are out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Edgelands that provide cover for those with something to hide and sanctuary for those who just want to escape from modernity. The latter was just what the Old Believers were looking for when they moved to the East Prussian village of Eckertsdorf in 1831.
Eckertsdorf to Wojnowo
Swinging off the main road, we follow the rutted tarmac north to Eckertsdorf, a village which straggles along a single road. Today it is known by the Polish name of Wojnowo. It is a neat place with well-tended gardens, trimmed grass verges and an evident sense of community.
Our visit coincides with a photography festival, with picket fences along the village road decorated with huge photographic prints that document a changing Poland. Here are sepia-toned images of rural life and gritty scenes from another world: muddy frolics at the annual Przystanek Woodstock rock festival (now called Pol’and’Rock Festival), elderly women queuing patiently outside grocery stores in the 1980s, early Solidarność demos and much more. One set of photographs focuses on elderly men with extraordinary beards, a nice reminder that there was a time when a beard was de rigueur for men of a certain age in this village — a visible symbol of a conservative code that for several generations underpinned and shaped everyday life in Wojnowo.
For Wojnowo is a place with a very special history. It is a village created from nothing by a community of devout Russians whose ancestors had, almost 200 years earlier, left the mainstream Orthodox Church in a dramatic schism.
It is, for a Polish village, unusual that the three churches in Wojnowo all bear the distinctive emblems of Orthodoxy rather than Roman Catholicism.
The term Old Believers covers a whole range of groups which in the late 17th century defied the magisterium of the Russian Orthodox Church and split off, fragmenting into myriad sects. The group which in 1831 settled in Wojnowo was at the conservative end of the Old Believer spectrum, a close-knit community of prayerful people who lived simple lives. They fished, tilled the land, kept bees and worked in the forest.
Wojnowo was one of 11 new villages created by Old Believers in the German territory of East Prussia. These settlers had all moved a relatively short distance from nearby places in the Russian Empire across the border into Ostpreußen. The German king Friedrich Wilhelm III assented to the migration, offering the newcomers cheap land, tax privileges and, for the first generation of male settlers, a dispensation relieving them of any obligation for military service. Concessions indeed, but ultimately that move into the German realm was to spell the end of the independence and isolation which was so essential to the Old Believer way of life.
The one-time Old Believers’ convent in Wojnowo — in Poland’s Masuria district — has been much renovated in recent years. Visitors can spend time in the former chapel which is still a haven of peace and quiet. There is also a café (photo @ hidden europe).
The settlers who came to Eckertsdorf in 1831 built their houses in the traditional Russian manner and some of their original homes can still be seen in Wojnowo today. They brought with them Russian habits, among them an affection for the lakeside banya (sauna), and these simple wooden structures have also survived. But in the texture and fabric of village life today there are but the barest threads of this community’s former faith history.
Orthodox connections
It is, for a Polish village, unusual that the three churches in Wojnowo all bear the distinctive emblems of Orthodoxy rather than Roman Catholicism. The parish church at the northern end of the village, a graceful white wooden building with striking blue ornamentation, is still used day-in day-out for prayers, and every Sunday a score or more of the village faithful regularly attend the Divine Liturgy there. During the week the church, dedicated to the Dormition of Mary, is well-used by Orthodox nuns which live in a fine brick convent just east of the church. But these nuns are not Old Believers.
“No, we are not Russian,” explains one of the nuns in faltering German when we stop by the church on a sunny Saturday afternoon. “This church and our convent are these days part of the Polish Orthodox Church. If you are looking for the Russians, you’ll need to go to the old convent at the other end of the village. But the last nuns there have long since died.”
Walking back through the village, past the storks’ nests and wooden cottages, we note the second of the village churches, also Orthodox but rarely used these days, and eventually reach a rough track which dips down over the fields towards a large lake. Following the track over a gentle rise, we see a small huddle of wooden and red-brick buildings with a pale yellow church, which we approach through an ornamental gateway topped by that distinctive triple-barred cross with an angled lower crossbar (called a suppedaneum cross) which is the telltale mark of Orthodox allegiances. It is here in this former convent that there is still a faint echo of the spirit of the Old Believers who founded this village in 1831. So who were these people?
The term Old Believers covers a wide range of dissenting sects and groups which split from the main Russian Orthodox Church following the introduction of liturgical reforms by Patriarch Nikon in the 1650s. Many priests were disquieted by changes to the wording of sacred texts, even though the amendments actually faithfully reinstated the spirit of the Greek originals.
For the laity, the disruptive effect of the Nikonian reforms was profound. The everyday theatre of the liturgy was transformed, with perfunctory bows replacing elaborate prostrations — an innovation which may have found favour among less agile worshippers, but one which was widely regarded as not being sufficiently penitential as to invite Divine mercy. The imposition of a new version of the Sign of the Cross, using three fingers instead of just two, may have been prompted by sound reasoning about the importance of the Holy Trinity, but that didn’t wash with the conservative faithful who had crossed themselves with two fingers since infancy and had no intention of changing that time-worn habit merely to appease Patriarch Nikon.
It is here in this former convent that there is still a faint echo of the spirit of the Old Believers who founded this village in 1831.
The stage was thus arranged for a dramatic set-piece confrontation between Old and New, with the mood aggravated in the years after the Nikonian reforms by apocalyptic predictions that the world would end in 1666. Some of the dissenters even suggested that Nikon was the Antichrist alluded to in the Johannine epistles. The eschatological perspectives of the Old Believers found no favour with the hierarchy and the traditionalists’ most vocal advocates were rounded up and punished — with some even being burnt at the stake. The persecution of Old Believers was later to prove an inspiration to Russian artists and writers — see the painting by Vasily Surikov on page 29. In 1683, a new law effectively made it impossible for Old Believers to remain in the more settled areas of the Russian Empire, and the great majority fled into exile. A movement that had never been coherent became even more fragmented. Some sought sanctuary in the wilds of Siberia, others moved deep into the Karelian forests, while many braved the harsh coastlands around the White Sea.
Defying authority
The key to survival was to make new lives far from the main centres of tsarist power, ideally in remote regions where the Orthodox authorities had little influence in day-to-day affairs. There were such places even in the Baltic region. Old Believers settled on the west side of Lake Peipsi in territory which is today part of Estonia — and descendants of those original settlers live in those same villages today, some of them still faithful to Old Believer traditions. Others settled in the forest lands towards (or beyond) the western fringes of the Russian Empire. Thus there are Old Believers in and around Vetka (in what is now the south-east corner of Belarus) and around Suwałki and Sejny in Poland.
For many Old Believers the escape into exile was a hurried affair. Few remained in the region to which they initially moved. From Vetka, for example, many thousands of Old Believers moved to the Bukhtarma Valley on the south side of the Altai Mountains (which is today part of Kazakhstan). And with increasing Russian influence in the Suwałki area in the post-Napoleonic period, some of the Old Believers emerged from the forests and moved into the German territory of East Prussia. The group who in 1831 settled in Eckertsdorf — now Wojnowo — were among them. Interestingly, other Old Believers remained in and around Suwałki, so visitors willing to really get off the beaten track can still find traces of the Old Believers there today. The simple churches at Gabowe Grądy (40 km south of Suwałki) and Wodziłki (16 km north-west of Suwałki) are both fine examples of Old Believer architecture.
The fact that the Old Believers split so decisively from the mainstream Orthodox Church without any bishops, left them unable to ordain their own priests. The few priests who joined the early dissenters (see box on page 25) could not easily be replaced when they died.
Many of the more conservative communities, like those who moved to Wojnowo, accepted this situation with all its awful consequences. If there were no priests, then there could be no sacrament of marriage, which meant that children inevitably were born out of wedlock. These ‘priestless’ Old Believers organised themselves in their own way, relying on a lay nastavik (literally a ‘navigator’) to show some leadership in the community in the absence of a priest.
For these priestless Old Believers, any notion of hierarchy and authority is anathema. Even today, they fiercely protect their independence, adhering in varying degrees to traditional values and lifestyles. But as the community in Wojnowo discovered, it wasn’t always easy to avoid encounters with modernity. From the late 19th-century, the influence of nation states and their attendant bureaucracies penetrated into even the remotest corners of Eurasia, making it ever harder for the Old Believers to maintain their reclusive lifestyles.
Thus we see the inexorable conundrum of Old Believer life, as the “purity” of the original dissenters is diluted through time, and most particularly when a group decides after 200 years of ecclesiastical isolation to once again invite priestly leaders back into their community. The priestless Old Believers now constitute only a small minority of all Old Believers.
Winds of change
For the Old Believers in Eckertsdorf, the creeping intrusion of the German state challenged traditional life. Compulsory schooling meant that a younger generation was exposed to new ideas. But the old lakeside convent survived as a haven of traditional values. The last prioress of the community was Sister Antonina Kondratyeva who died in 1972. For the handful of nuns who outlived their prioress, the last years of their lives were surely not easy. Lena, born in 1912, and Fima, born in 1916, were the very last. Both died in the late 1990s. And with them went a tranche of Wojnowo history.
Inside the chapel of the Old Believers at the former convent in Wojnowo (photo © hidden europe).
Today, a steady stream of visitors, many of them Germans looking for family roots in East Prussia, visit Wojnowo and most of those visitors make their way to the erstwhile convent of the Old Believers. Over the last four years, there has been a major programme of renovation. But the sisters’ private chapel and their cemetery remain largely untouched. In the chapel, there are all the armamentaria of devotion — icons and a traditional lestovka (a prayer chain akin to a Catholic rosary) in the style favoured by the Old Believers with fine stitching and brocade.
We wander down to the cemetery by the lake. It is eerily atmospheric — the cemetery’s simple wooden grave markers having a strange hint of Russia in a foreign land. The sun slips slowly down towards the lake, and suddenly we are aware of voices behind us. There stand a group of students accompanied by an energetic young man who is evidently their guide and tutor. “This is an important spot for cultural tourism,” says the lecturer. “It’s something that we can ‘sell’ as a place worth visiting.”
You can, it seems, even put a price on faith these days. The lecturer gives a good account of Wojnowo, emphasising its status as a Polish village with an Orthodox history. He glosses over the fact that the Old Believer nuns who lived in the convent almost certainly perceived the women of the village to be complete harridans. Those few who, even well into the second half of the 20th century, clung to Old Believer traditions, could of course never properly marry in the sanctity of the Church. For they had no priests and therefore no sacraments. Family life meant living in sin. Considering these issues as the dusk closes in on the graveyard, we begin to see why many in Wojnowo were prepared to forsake their Old Believer traditions to find succour within the Polish Orthodox Church which is itself a very minor player in the wider world of Polish faith.
Next morning we are back at the café by the former convent of the Old Believers. There are wisps of mist on the lake, and the whiff of fresh coffee in the air. “You’re German, aren’t you,” asks a man who is enjoying a quiet smoke in the morning sunshine. We nod, and he goes on to recount how he has lived and worked in Germany. “And I’m not the only one,” he adds. “There’s quite a number from Wojnowo who have moved to Germany,” he explains.
It was a German monarch who afforded sanctuary to the Old Believers in the easternmost part of the Prussian Empire. Generations later, it was the modern German state which opened its doors to those in eastern Europe and beyond who could demonstrate German roots. And in the 1990s, the surviving Old Believers of Wojnowo, no longer quite so devout as their ancestors, took advantage of the fact that German nationality had been conferred on the early settlers, using that German inheritance to claim the right to settle in Germany.
“Gone, but not forgotten,” says the man outside the café. “Many of them still come back each summer for a few weeks. Indeed, there’s quite a number who still own homes here.”
Location of Wojnowo
