Ukraine’s first religious book for blind people, a prayer book in Braille, has been published in Lutsk with the assistance of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s (UOC) Volyn Diocese.
This prayer book may also be considered a rarity because it exists in three copies only, having been manually produced by students of the Volyn Theological Seminary. Before doing this job, Roman Ihnatiuk, Dmytro Teravsky, and Volodymyr Hryniuk learned the Braille system (invented 150 years ago by a blind teenager named Louis Braille), which is based on combinations of six raised dots. Yury Symonchuk, chairman of the Volyn regional branch of the Ukrainian Association for the Blind, says that the seminarians did backbreaking work: they had to pierce the dots by hand for two months after translating the prayers into the language of the blind. He recalled going to school with his mother when he was a child. After giving alms to a blind man near the church, his mother would ask him to pray for her kith and kin.
“This means that this blind man already knew his prayers! But atheism really rode roughshod over this category of people. Whereas ordinary people went to church as soon as it became possible and could immediately appreciate the rich interior and later learn prayers, the blind were incapable of this. So they had to begin from scratch,” Mr. Symonchuk told a press conference at the UOC’s Volyn Diocese devoted to the social services of the church.
Cooperating with the Association for the Blind is somewhat peculiar.
“When I took over as head of the association’s regional branch, I took all the blind people from the marketplaces, where they stood begging, to workshops. Our enterprise used to employ 420 people compared to only 20 today. The blind have been left with a tiny pension and hope in God,” Mr. Symonchuk continued.
As part of the assistance offered by the UOC’s Volyn Diocese, Rev. Valentyn Marchuk and the priests Zosyma and Onufriy visit this organization each Wednesday to offer the Divine Word to the blind. In St. Panteleimon’s Church the blind heard a liturgy with a commentary: the churchgoers were divided into groups, and a priest explained to each group what was going on during the service. Mr. Symonchuk calls this a “bold step.” Later on, a similar service (separately for the blind to make them properly understand the essence) was held at the Stary Chortoryisk monastery. So when the flock made a pilgrimage to Pochayiv, “no commentaries were needed.” The choir, which forms part of the association, sang for the first time in the 750-year-long history of this spiritual abode.
At present, five-six people are registered at the regional Association for the Blind every month. Although there are 2,000 blind people in Volyn and over 50,000 in Ukraine, only the UOC’s Volyn Diocese conducts a charitable rite known as Sunday for those blind from birth on the sixth Sunday after Easter. While the Gospels and Old Testament have been published in Braille only in the West, the little Ukrainian prayer book has appeared exclusively in Volyn. Since Ukrainian publishing houses demand money for everything, Yury Symonchuk asked journalists to relay to “those people who stay awake at night for fear of losing their money” the blind people’s request that they donate some money to purchase a special Braille printer, valued at 42,000 hryvnias. Then many more than just three handwritten copies of the prayer book could be published.
