As Crimea prepares to vote on throwing in its lot with Russia, Michael Bourdeaux untangles the complex history of religion in Ukraine
Kiev is the very cradle of Russian Orthodoxy and therefore Moscow’s emotional allegiance to Ukraine’s capital is understandable. It was here, after the conversion of Prince Vladimir from paganism in 988, that the second great stronghold of the Orthodox Church emerged, inheriting Greek religion from Byzantium. The very name of Russia came from “Kievskaya Rus”; three centuries later the incursion of the Mongol Golden Horde drove Kievan civilisation north to become Muscovy.
In tsarist times the significant Muslim Tartar population in the Crimea had considerable autonomy, destroyed by Stalin’s deportation of these people during the Second World War, but they