Overview
For people following the news from Ukraine in 2019, the recognition of the autocephaly of the newly reorganized Orthodox Church of Ukraine by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople may have seemed like a radical innovation or a historical rupture. Or they may have simply been baffled by all of the fuss.
In fact, the events of 2019 were not so much a rupture as a historical re-connection. Rather than a radical innovation, it was the culmination of over a century of determined effort.
This exhibition tells the story of the long path from the extraordinary flowering of the Kyivan Church under Petro Mohyla, who became Metropolitan of Kyiv in 1633, through the de facto incorporation of the Kyiv Metropolia into the Moscow Patriarchate, and finally to the struggles for the renewal of local control during the 20th and 21st centuries.