Pagan, imperial, atheist, orthodox, a green spirit muscles through Russian history.
Patriarch Kirill, at right, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, presided over services on the eve of Pentecost, at the cathedral of the Holy Trinity-Sergius Lavra, Russia, June 11, 2011.
Photo: Moscow Patriarchate
In the Protestant denomination of our raising, Pentecost meant an outpouring of red Sunday outfits and searing reference to the apostles’ “tongues of fire.” In the Eastern Orthodox faith, Pentecost – better known as Trinity Sunday – is green.
The Orthodox clergy wear green vestments shot through with golden threads, and churches are generously festooned with boughs of birch. Clusters of the spring leaves, heart shaped and serrated, stand in windows, adorn pulpits, and surround icons. In some parishes, stems of birch are scattered over the church floors, too. It’s as if the Holy Spirit descended not as fire but wind, shredding the trees outside and gusting them into the nave.
Name-Day feast at the Orthodox parish of Azdamichy-Tsjerablichy, June 14 in 2011, the Tuesday after Trinity Sunday.
Photo: Radzima Photo
We were alerted to this practice of Orthodox Christianity by John Kunstadter’s awe-inspiring Radzima Photo, his exquisite chronicle of life in Belarus. John writes, “Placed throughout churches for Trinity, birch branches are a traditional Belarusian symbol of fertility and the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit.”
The branch in a high window, soft sunlight glowing beyond it, makes “spirit” fresh and demonstrative – a power both transcendent and everyday.
A Russian blogger explains, “The Feast of the Holy Trinity (or Holy Trinity Day) is celebrated through decoration. Villagers nail tree branches to their front porches and gates, transforming houses into fairy-tale-like wood dwellings. Indoors, the floors are covered with cut grass.”
In the Ukraine, “Holy Trinity Day coincided with a series of Slavic pagan holidays called Zeleniye Svyatki, or ‘Green Christmastide,” which focussed on the worship of the “Spirits of Greenery.’” One of these holidays, Semik, was presided over by the birch in particular. “This explains why branches of the birch tree were frequently used to decorate houses and churches and why villagers liked to arrange dances [khorovody] around birch-trees.”
Anthropologist Margaret Paxon undertook a full-fledged study of Trinity customs in Anufrievo, a village in rural Russia. Her trenchant research explores how the oldest springtime traditions there, agrarian rites, were arrogated by the Orthodox Christian church, then sterilized by Soviet politics. The Soviets actually burned the local church where Paxon did her field work. They killed clergy, turned churches, including the great cathedral of Moscow, into museums and recreation centers, while launching a propaganda campaign to purge religion from Russian life.
The birch tree was hard to tame.
But they tried. One of Paxon’s more elderly sources reported, “On the holiday that was once Troitsa [Trinity], they would bring rows of beryozki branches into the clubhouse and girls would dance under them….Birches are good for the pochki (kidneys) and can clean dirty air.'”
Less austere celebrations with birch boughs persist in parts of Russia during the Pentecost season, 2011. Photo: Lucky Lovers
The Kremlin set up these “clubhouses” throughout rural Russia as spaces where social impulses and long-held traditions could be channelled and contained, local spirits appeased with antiseptic praise.
Paxon found: “Like the church, it was partly the job of the clubhouse to literally bring people in. Rein them in….It took activities (like dancing and singing) that had been traditionally performed in the open air (the fields, the forest, the graveyard) and brought them inside–placing them in a sometimes tense, administrative, space….There were practical considerations to bringing these festivals inside: when partying outside, village boys regularly waged a sort of ritualized intervillage gang-warfare. The clubhouse was one way of keeping this violence under wrap as well.”
Paxon did her research in 1995-1996. Since then, of course, the Orthodox church in Russia has come roaring back, and not surprisingly it is laying claim to that same primal (and pagan) force. At the All-Night Vigil before Trinity Sunday flanked by his archbishops, Patriarch Krill presided over a gilded forest inside the cathedral of Holy Trinity-Sergius Lavra, Russia’s holiest monastery. Boughs of birch hovered over candles as Krill recited the liturgy.
Russian Orthodox altar cloth with birch leaves
Photo: Christian Embroidery
Krill notoriously reversed his 2021 Christmas message of peace once Vladimir Putin invaded the Ukraine in early 2022. “The Russian Orthodox Church has become a central pillar of the Kremlin’s political and informational warfare strategy,” writes Kateryna Odarchenko. She describes the braided histories of the Russian Orthodox Church and political powers going back to Peter the Great…Bolshevik Revolution /church authority out; World War II/ church authority in — but under the command of the KGB.
Where does that leave beryozki ?
Dmytro Yagunov, an apologist for Ukraine, goes so far as to brand birch trees as instruments of Russian colonization. But birch boughs certainly appear in Orthodox ceremonies on Trinity Sunday far beyond the borders of Russia, not only in Ukraine but Seattle, Washington, D.C. and Jordonville, NY. A quarter century ago, Paxon had found that ritual greenery inside the church (and church going in general) had largely disappeared. What had endured was a memorial: people still took birch branches to cemeteries, turning the season of Holy Trinity into something more like U.S. Decoration Day.
In this persistence, Paxon finds the birches win out. “The deep part of memory asserts and reasserts itself even in the face of aggressive opposition; …the “powers that be”–whether represented by official religion or the state–do in fact exert their power over memory, but fail to overcome it.”
From the vantage point of the personal, the local, there’s been too much lost, too much learned, with too much still at stake. Another Russian commentator stressed, “The Slavic peoples have long [observed] the custom to plant a birch tree over the grave of the fallen soldiers—that their life went on in the earth’s tree. How many birch groves were planted after the Great Patriotic War!”
And which war was that?
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