2023-07-24 12:29:38
Unesco condemned Sunday July 23 “with the greatest firmness” THE “brutal strikes carried out by Russian forces” having affected several sites in the center of Odessa, in the south of Ukraine, a world heritage site, in particular the cathedral of the Transfiguration, which is more than 200 years old.
???????? There has been another intense attack on #Odessa. The main Orthodox cathedral is one of several historical parts of central Odesa, a UNESCO world heritage site. This latest attack has killed one & injured 17-18 people so far, including kids.#Ukrainepic.twitter.com/g77bQVZABT
— Mriya Report (@MriyaReport) July 23, 2023
While this building is the first on this list to have been the object of an attack, according to UNESCO, 116 Ukrainian religious buildings have been damaged since the beginning of the Russian invasion in February 2022. The Ukrainian State Agency for Ethnic Affairs and Freedom of Conscience released in July 2022 an even more damning document for Moscow, claiming that 183 religious buildings had been damaged by the Russian occupier.
Most of the sites affected are mainly in the east, north and south of the country, around the front line, unlike the Church of the Transfiguration, located in Odessa, a city in the south-west still spared by the fighting but repeatedly hit by bombardments.
Thirty victims in a monastery
This is particularly true in Luhansk, where around fifteen places of worship were affected. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba claimed that Russia was destroying “in a systematic way the Orthodox Church of Ukraine”, considering that Moscow was “the only threat” that weighed on her.
In Chernihiv, Russian forces also damaged the Holy Trinity Monastery. Built in 1695 in the Ukrainian Baroque style, it was hit during the siege of the city. In Kharkiv, in the northeast, the Dormition Cathedral, built in 1657, was hit by a cruise missile which destroyed several statues and 360-year-old stained glass windows. It also depended on the Patriarchate of Moscow. “We can no longer say that Vladimir Putin is defending his Church”had quipped Volodymyr Zelensky at the time.
In March 2022, a few days after the start of the invasion, the Russians also bombed the Svyatohirsk Lavra, an important Ukrainian monastery located in the Donbass, whose origins date back to at least 1526 and which was one of the largest monasteries in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. The attack caused about thirty victims, including the Archimandrite, among the thousand people who had taken refuge there.
The divisions of Ukrainian Orthodoxy
This bombardment is all the more astonishing since, like the Cathedral of the Dormition, the monastery was at the time part of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, attached to the Patriarchate of Moscow. In May 2022, however, she decided to distance herself from Russia. In response, the Russian Orthodox Church had annexed the parishes of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Crimea.
Russians have hit a skete that is part of the Sviatohirsk monastery. The latter belongs to the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine. Earlier this week several monks&nuns were killed in the Russian shelling of the monastery. Is this “friendly fire” a part of denazification? pic.twitter.com/i5iZzsFXo7
— UkraineWorld (@ukraine_world) June 4, 2022
If the Orthodox places of worship logically constitute the major part of the destroyed sites, the Protestants also paid a heavy price with at least 22 buildings affected, against three Catholics, two belonging to the Greek-Catholic Church, as well as five Jewish places of worship and as many Muslims.
Religious buildings are not the only treasures of Ukrainian heritage to have been damaged by Russian troops. The Ivankiv museum, which housed the paintings of the Ukrainian painter Maria Primachenko, representative of naive art admired by Pablo Picasso, was notably set on fire in March 2022.
#Odessa #countrys #religious #heritage #danger