Natalie Kononenko gathered hundreds of hours of interviews as part of a team studying Ukrainian churches in the Prairies.
“People talked about how the church is very flexible,” she said. “It has to be. You’ve got one priest, 12 parishioners, and you’re having a Church service every Sunday? No way. So people adapted. I heard about adaptations in weddings, in baptisms, in funerals.”
“When I first started this, I was a little bit unnerved by the attention to cemeteries,” she said. “People would drive from Edmonton to Hafford, Saskatchewan, which is quite a jog. And, why? Because their ancestors are buried in Hafford. People take bread and fruit — symbolically, the products of the earth — and put them out on a ritual towel on their ancestor’s grave. And then it is blessed with holy water.
Some of the changing traditions Kononenko heard about have very practical roots. For example, the Ukrainian practice of throwing a dish of Kutya — boiled wheat berries with honey — at the ceiling to predict the harvest fell sharply out of favour around the time when stippled ceilings came into fashion on the Prairies.
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