The Transfiguration Cathedral, one of the oldest Orthodox churches in Ukraine and which dates back to the early 11th century, has been turned into a makeshift movie theater, according to an MP.
The issue has been highlighted by Artyom Dmitruk, a Ukrainian lawmaker known for his public opposition to the Kiev government’s crackdown on the country’s largest Christian denomination, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC). The MP was ultimately forced to flee the country over his views and is now being sought by Ukrainian authorities.
Dmitruk has cited imagery circulating online to back up his assertions. The building was seized by authorities last year.
“[Vladimir] Zelensky’s dogs, having seized the most ancient cathedral in Ukraine, set up a cinema in it and removed all the icons,” Dmitruk wrote on his Telegram channel, claiming that people attending the ‘cinema’ have been charged 20 hryvnias (about 50 cents) for entry.
Pictures shared by the MP show a darkened interior of the cathedral, with a small group watching a large TV screen erected in front of the altar. The place of worship appears to lack any icons, with some pictures placed on easels visible near the TV. According to local media reports, the images were recorded on Friday at the premiere of a documentary movie titled ‘Principality of Chernigov. 1,000 years.’
Transfiguration Cathedral, located about 100 miles north of Kiev, was seized by the authorities in October last year, with the UOC priests forcibly evicted from its premises by armed and masked individuals. Officials and a local museum that were managing the cathedral and leasing it to the canonical church at the time, claimed the premises was in an extremely poor condition due to UOC’s neglect and that it required renovation immediately.
In the same post, Dmitruk also mentioned a recent scandal in the western Ukrainian city of Lutsk, where a local cathedral, controlled by the schismatic Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), was adorned with frescoes of local businessmen, who purportedly donated funds to its restoration.
“The OCU cathedral in Lutsk was painted with frescoes with portraits of local bandit-businessmen. The work has been initiated personally by the Volyn ‘bishop’ of the OCU Mikhail Zinkevich. This is awful,” the MP wrote.
The frescoes have reportedly received a mixed reaction even among local followers of the OCU, with some branding the display a sacrilege and demanding their removal. However, painting portraits of ktetors, major donors who provide funds for construction or reconstruction of a church, is a longstanding tradition in Eastern Christianity and is not offensive by any means.
Ukraine has been gripped by religious tensions throughout most of its modern history, with multiple entities claiming to be the country’s true Orthodox Church.
The situation rapidly deteriorated after 2018, when the OCU was established with the active backing of then-president Pyotr Poroshenko, who secured a special decree to legitimize the entity from the Constantinople Patriarchate. The move caused a major rift in the Orthodox world, with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) severing its ties with Constantinople and branding the OCU schismatics.
The persecution of the canonical UOC intensified after the escalation of a long-running conflict between Moscow and Kiev in February 2022. Although the church formally declared independence from Moscow, this did not spare it from repeated accusations of working for Russia.