There is a popular Lake Verbne in Kyiv’s Obolon district. In the summertime, its beaches draw thousands who lie on the dirty sand for hours on end, melting from the heat and munching down God knows what (with the leftovers being, of course, buried in the sand right next to the ersatz table), guzzling enormous quantities of beer (with plastic bottles being chucked to the water, where they float like swans until winter), and enjoying the endless symphony of the nearby highway. Once a day every sun worshipper always gets up, take a quick waist-deep wade in the lake, and then again lies in the sun or continues to eat and drink. Such archaic pastimes as beach ball, chess, or reading at least some kind of book have long gone out of fashion. Nor does anybody remember any such thing as swimming. In fact, part of the district sewerage system, the dirty and littered Verbne is, for some reason, touted by the media as a supposedly pollution-free and healthful lake. This, however, is not the subject of this article.
This summer, a wooden Orthodox cross, an object a bit unusual for such places, was put up on the Verbne bank. Unfortunately, I did not attend the festivities of its erection, but the latter is known to have been conducted solemnly in the presence of clergy and others who had come here in a religious procession from Obolon’s Church of the Holy Veil (Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Moscow Patriarchate). The cross was stuck in the sand, a small plot of ground was cleared for pot marigolds, and a liturgy was recited. It is written on one side of the cross (incidentally, in Russian, although the overwhelming majority of Obolon residents speak Ukrainian) that this is dedicated to the memory of the Equal to the Apostles saint, Princess Olha, with the other side bearing a small icon of the princess.
Within a few days the canonized princess’s icon had vanished without a trace, and now its place on the cross proudly depicts the immortal words in Russian, “Vitiuk (diminutive of Viktor) was here.” The flowers have been trampled down by the merrymakers who relaxed here during the sunbathing season. This is graphically portrayed even today by the garbage and cigarette butts around the cross. Last summer, you could often see the crossbar serving as a suitable hanger for clothes and a place to dry swimsuits. One more thing is that the lake does not function only by day: on warm summer nights you can watch a whirlwind of uninhibited pagan frolicking spinning around the cross, hear drunken laughter, obscenities, female squealing, and see naked bodies doing what comes natural in the dark.
But what did the church expect, putting up a cross in such surroundings? For, taking into account the general state of our spiritual virtue, that cross will have no effect on the environment’s piety (quite the opposite: the environment has clearly affected the cross). In all probability, the church intended to mark its canonical territory with the cross. This was undoubtedly a worthy idea but ended up in what is known as profanation. The sense of sacrilege is further reinforced when in the summer, if you look at this place from the upper-level road, it looks like an Orthodox grave surrounded by a nearly naked crowd.
This totally unnecessary Obolon cross in the middle of the local beach blanket bingo could be taken as a symbol of modern Orthodox life characterized by its competitive zeal for spheres of influence. It is something like a gold rush or hurdling: who comes first, the strongest or the one on top? Monasteries are being built everywhere for the still unborn (perhaps never to be born) residents. Churches are being hastily erected, sometimes two or three in a half-empty village of old unbelievers. After solemn blessing, they stand empty and cold and are sometimes even used as warehouses for building materials for the new houses of the parish priests. Meanwhile, the true architects of these temples and the respective architectural styles are likely to come into God’s world fifty years or so later, when all things around us will have calmed down.
Generations to come will scarcely study and take pride in themselves from the churches now popping up over the whole country in such a way as we are proud of those our ancestors built. For it is impossible in our hostile and temporally limited conditions, to build churches for centuries to come. What turns out better here are shelters, warehouses, or even crosses on the beach.
