In connection with the Day of the Baptism of Ukraine-Rus, which will be celebrated on July 15, the head of the OCU, Metropolitan Epifaniy, reminded how Muscovy appropriated the church and name “Rus” from the Ukrainians.
He wrote about this on Facebook.
Later, seven centuries later, Muscovy stole our name, ‘Rus’, and by order of Tsar Peter I (1721), the Muscovy kingdom was called the ‘Russian Empire’, and Muscovites – ‘Russians’. This gave them the opportunity to appropriate our glorious ancient history as well, to rewrite it, inventing the myth of the ‘one great nation’ and to declare all our ancient achievements as their own,” Epifaniy noted.
He also reminded that the Muscovites enslaved the Ukrainian church as well.
“On July 15, we will celebrate the 1036th anniversary of that epochal event that laid an unshakable foundation for Christian European Ukraine. This is truly OUR holiday, which reminds of an event that took place more than a millennium ago in our Ukrainian lands, precisely in Kyiv, on the banks of the Dnipro. This event was initiated by our Kyiv ruler, Prince Volodymyr the Great, and it was Kyivans who were baptized then in the Dnipro waters! Not Muscovites, and even more so not ‘Russian people’, because in those days no such thing existed, and on the site of the future formation of Muscovy there were only dense forests and impassable swamps.
Having spoiled its history, they created another myth that ‘thanks to the baptism of the Great Russian Prince Volodymyr, the Russian Orthodox Church has its millennium-old history’… But this is not true! Our, Ukrainian Church, the Kyiv Metropolitanate has a history of more than a thousand years. The Kyiv Metropolitanate in the Kyiv State was founded in the early 990s. From the official Baptism of Kyiv (988) to the first mention of the founding of Moscow (1147), 159 years have passed, more than a century and a half! And there was no ‘Moscow Church’ then, and there wasn’t for several centuries after that. Therefore, the Russian Orthodox Church cannot have a ‘millenium-long history’, let alone be a mother for us, Kyiv, no matter how hard they dream about it and trying to assert,” the metropolitan emphasized.
