Sanctuary Project Captures Alberta's Ukrainian Religious Culture

Farmers arrive in their pick-ups [trucks] and open country churches for the fieldworkers and volunteers of the Sanctuary Project.

The Sanctuary crew comes armed with a film camera, digital cameras, tripods, measuring devices, a computer, and a spray bottle and rag to clean things. In a matter of hours, they photograph the exterior of a Ukrainian Catholic or Orthodox church, every image and furnishing inside the church, every vestment, and every tombstone.

The idea is to preserve in photographs a unique culture that is endangered. Many of the churches visited as part of the  Sanctuary Project have been vandalized or robbed within the past five years. Thieves have taken crucifixes, candle stands, and gospel books. Many churches have had to replace the older treasures that were bequeathed to them by the pioneers who originally built the churches.

The rural congregations are also shrinking in size. The crew recently visited a church with a large cemetery, which indicates that in the past this was a vibrant, populous congregation. Today, this parish has only thirteen members.

Services in most rural churches have been reduced to a few times a year, and bishops have had to make hard decisions about which churches to keep open and which to close. Many of the closed churches will be razed; others will disintegrate slowly.

The fieldworkers preserving a record of these churches and other Ukrainian religious sites are young people interested in Ukrainian history and culture. They do not earn much, and the work—which depends on obtaining funding—is not steady, so one cannot praise their dedication enough. The volunteers tend to be of an older generation, generally people who have had a long-standing interest in Ukrainian-Canadian culture and understand what is at stake.

People seldom realize how special the Ukrainian sacral legacy in the Canadian Prairies is. Across a large swath of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, there are Ukrainian rural settlements that give the Prairies a distinctive flavour. The onion-domed church rising out of flat grassland has now become a prairie icon. This territory represents the most extensive colonization in the New World by a culture deriving ultimately from Byzantium, as well as the most Ukrainian-marked territory in North America. Preparing a careful record of it is essential.

After the crew photographs everything, the data is entered on spreadsheets and a database in order to facilitate research by historians, art historians, anthropologists, folklorists, and religious-studies scholars. Scholarly work on the record of this culture will be a way of keeping it alive.

Sanctuary: The Spiritual Heritage Documentation Project is the creation of three professors at the University of Alberta and is spearheaded by the Research Program on Religion and Culture at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta.

Each professor offers his or her own expertise and unique background. John-Paul Himka, the director of the Religion and Culture program, has worked for many years on church history and iconography in Ukraine but is now turning his attention to what Yar Slavutych has called “Canadian Ukraine.” Natalie Kononenko, who is Kule Professor of Ukrainian Ethnography, brings to the Sanctuary Project extensive experience in fieldwork, both in Ukraine and in Ukrainian communities in Alberta; she also engages the photographic and computer skills of her husband, Peter Holloway. Frances Swyripa, of the Department of History and Classics, has worked on the history of Ukrainians in Canada for more than thirty years and has developed a strong interest in sacral landscapes.

For more information on the Sanctuary Project, please contact John-Paul Himka (jhimka@ualberta.ca) or visit the website of the Research Program on Religion and Culture (http://www.ualberta.ca/~cius/religion-culture/index.htm).

Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press Release