With faith in Christ and hope in the resurrection, we share news of the repose of St. Vladimir’s Trustee Emeritus Albert P. Foundos (Garden City Park, NY), who fell asleep in the Lord on April 23, 2021 at the age of 85.
Albert Foundos was born on May 23, 1935, the oldest son of Lambi and Orthodoxia Fundo in Korçë, Albania, and emigrated to the United States with his family in 1948 at the young age of 13. In the United States, he completed high school and went on to The City College of New York for a degree in chemical engineering. After serving as a captain in the U.S. Army, he returned to City College where he earned an MBA.
In 1959, he married Joan Malasko. They were blessed with a beautiful marriage and three children, Phillip, Donna, and Christine, and later with nine grandchildren.
Foundos was an accomplished inventor, engineer, and academic, a successful entrepreneur, and a person of great generosity and compassion. He was a general partner of TFF Limited Partnership; president of Cigar Oasis, Inc.; founder, chairman, and CEO of Fluid Data, Inc; and founder and chairman of Lamsia Corporation, a company that aided Albanian workers after the fall of communism in his native country. Foundos also built an incredibly close relationship to Archbishop Anastasios of Tirana, Albania, and worked together with His Eminence to promote the positive growth of the Orthodox Church there. His philanthropic activities extended to a number of charities and included serving on the Board of International Orthodox Christian Charities and the Board of the National Albanian American Council.
Foundos spent many years in faithful service to St. Vladimir’s Seminary, first becoming a trustee in 1982 under the tenure of Fr. Alexander Schmemann. He would later serve as treasurer and chairman of the Finance Committee, a position he held for many years. Foundos’s leadership talents were put to brilliant use as the co-chair of the Seminary’s first major capital campaign, successfully resulting in a tremendous expansion of the facilities and programs at St. Vladimir’s. The Seminary would later bestow upon Foundos the title of Trustee Emeritus following his retirement from its Board of Trustees, as well as the degree Doctor of Humane Letters (D.H.L.), honoris causa, in 2010, when Foundos also delivered the commencement address to the Seminary’s graduating class.
Throughout his life, Foundos was a devoted member of St. Nicholas Albanian Orthodox Church in Queens, NY, serving on the parish council and holding a variety of leadership positions. He always worked tirelessly to deepen his faith and share it with others.
He was loved and cherished by many, including his wife Joan; his siblings, Louis Ilia Foundos and Viola; his children, Phillip Foundos, Donna Oswald, and Christine Beno; his grandchildren, Matthew, Christina, Andrew, Nicholas, Kimberly, Daniel, Alex, James, and Daniela; and his parents, Llambi and Orthodoxia. He was also cherished by nieces, nephews, and godchildren.
Visitation will be held on Monday, April 26 from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Park Funeral Chapel (2175 Jericho Turnpike, Garden City Park, NY 11040). Services will be held on Tuesday, April 27 beginning at 10 a.m. at St. Nicholas Albanian Orthodox Church (181-14 Midland Pkwy, Jamaica, NY 11432).
With faith in Christ and hope in the resurrection, we share news of the repose of Archpriest Peter Pawlack, who fell asleep in the Lord on April 19, 2021.
Father Peter was born in Mayfield, PA the son of the late Julia (Hadginske) and Peter J. Pawlack. A younger sister and only sibling recently fell asleep in the Lord.
He graduated from (Eastside) New Jersey High School, attended Rollins College in Winter Park, FL and subsequently transferred to Rider College (now Rider University) in Lawrenceville, NJ to continue his undergraduate studies. He received his undergraduate degree in Commerce and Industrial Management from Rider College. In the fall of 1962 he entered St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary.
In June of 1964 he and the former Barbara Rugala were married by the late Archpriest Dimitri Ressetar, Archpriest John Meyendorff and Archpriest Paul Shafran at St. John’s Orthodox Church, Mayfield, PA.
On October 10, 1964 Fr. Peter was ordained to the Holy Diaconate at St. Vladimir’s Seminary Chapel by the late Archbishop John of San Francisco. Four months later on February 15th he was ordained to the Holy Priesthood at Protection of the Holy Virgin Mary in New York City by the late Archbishop Ireney of Boston. Upon completion of his Bachelor of Divinity degree from St. Vladimir’s Seminary in the spring of 1965 he was assigned to St. Mary’s Church in Waterbury, CT.
While serving as pastor of St. Mary’s Church, Fr. Peter advocated the use of the English language in an era when Church Slavonic was still quite prevalent. He served as spiritual advisor to the Atlantic District Eastern Orthodox Christian Education Association and the Atlantic District FROC, secretary of the Diocese of New England, and university Chaplain for the New England Diocese.
He returned to St. Vladimir’s Seminary in 1967-68 and completed requirements for the Master of Divinity degree which was awarded in May of 1968.
In June of 1968, Fr. Peter was assigned to St. John the Baptist Church, Warren, OH, where he served as pastor for 38 years.
During his pastorate at St. John’s Church, Fr. Peter has served as chairman of the Department of Church School Programs for the Chicago-Minneapolis Diocese, member of the Midwest Diocesan Council, member of St. Joseph Hospital’s Pastoral Advisory Council, member of the Warren Police/Clergy Crisis Intervention Team and vice-president of the Warren Clergy Association.
He has also served as secretary of the OCA Pension Board, chairman of the Cleveland Deanery Publications Committee, and was a member of the Howland Clergy Association.
Father Peter was elevated to archpriest in 1977 and awarded the Jeweled Cross by the Synod of Bishops in 1990.
Prior to his retirement Fr. Peter served as dean of the Ohio Deanery from 2004 to 2006. He retired from St. John the Baptist Church in August of 2006. During his retirement years he was a substitute priest as needed in parishes of the Ohio Deanery and for the last six years served Sunday Liturgy at the Orthodox Monastery of the Holy Transfiguration in Ellwood City, PA.
He is survived by his wife of 56 years, Barbara, two sons, Peter III and Gregory (Ruth Ann Bowers), and two grandchildren. His parents and only sister preceded him in death.
Final arrangements are by Peter Rossi & Son Memorial Chapel, 1884 North Road, Warren, OH. All services will be held at the Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration with the committal service at the Monastery Cemetery.
The nuns will receive Fr Peter’s earthly body at the monastery Tuesday evening at 6 p.m. He will lie in state in the monastery chapel from Tuesday evening until his burial on Friday.
Public services and visitation times are as follows:
Wednesday, April 21
10 a.m. - Pre-Sanctified Liturgy with visitations until 2 p.m.
Thursday, April 22
6:30 p.m. - Panikhida, served by the clergy, choir, and faithful of St. John’s Parish, with visitations until 8 p.m.
Friday, April 23
9 a.m. - Pre-Sanctified Liturgy
12 p.m. - Funeral Service and committal
Clergy and faithful who wish to attend any of the above services should call the monastery to make a reservation, at 724-758-4002. Attendance will be limited due to COVID-19 restrictions. Masks and distancing will be required.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests any donations to be sent to the Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration, 321 Monastery Lane, Ellwood City, PA 16117.
Few in the West realize that the second-largest Orthodox Church in the world is in Romania, and fewer still know the remarkable story of her recent past. Now, SVS Press is giving English-speaking readers a chance to learn more about the central figure of the Romanian Church’s rebuilding: Patriarch Daniel.
The new book, Patriarch Daniel: Rebuilding Orthodoxy in Romania, details how—after suffering the horrors of Communist persecution—the life of the Church there is once again flourishing. But many complexities and difficulties had to be overcome in order to reestablish and strengthen Church life—not only in outward building projects, but in fostering the inward spiritual growth of the faithful. At the center of all these important tasks we find Patriarch Daniel. In this book, the latest entry in SVS Press’s Orthodox Profiles Series, readers will learn about his life and encounter his own words as he addresses the challenges and the opportunities that face us today.
“One of Romania’s scholars and theologians, he has brought a vision, or strategic plan, that has guided the rebuilding of the patriarchate at every level. Nothing has been overlooked,” said St. Vladimir’s Seminary President Very Rev. Dr. Chad Hatfield, the editor of the Profiles Series.
“The goal of this book is to introduce this dynamic ‘father of a nation’ to the English-speaking world. The accomplishments of his ongoing patriarchal ministry are so extensive that this book can only give a small sample of his leadership.”
Patriarch Daniel can be purchased online, at SVSPress.com, or by calling 1-800-204-BOOK (2665).
I grew up in Osceola Mills, a very small town in central Pennsylvania located midway between Penn State University and the Horseshoe Curve near Altoona. The church, St. Mary’s (Nativity of the Virgin), was one of the early churches brought over to Orthodoxy from Uniatism in 1893 by Father Alexis Toth, now canonized a saint. Subsequently, many of the priests assigned to this parish were trained in Russia. As a result, even though the parish had Uniate beginnings, it was not long after its conversion to Orthodoxy that the Russian liturgical tradition thoroughly replaced those liturgical practices that usually are associated with Uniate churches—the choir replaced the cantor, Bakhmetev and the works of the Russian choral masters replaced Carpatho-Russian chanting, and the epistle was usually read in the typical Russian style.
Throughout the first part of the twentieth century the parish also had a trained choir director who not only taught church singing but also basic catechism and the Russian language. The parish, in times both good and bad, always had a good church choir. Of course, singing was done in Church Slavonic, even though in the early fifties very few of the singers either spoke or understood Russian. Until I was a freshman in high school, I remember that all services were conducted in Church Slavonic—no English was used. In 1948 when my uncle died, in order to have some English at the burial service, a priest was invited from Ohio, the late Fr. Andrew Glagolev, who came for the burial service and offered a litany, some prayers, and the sermon in English.
This began to change when Fr. John Nehrebecki was assigned as the priest in 1951. I remember the first attempt to introduce English at the Liturgy. Fr. John chanted the petitions for the Little Litany in English, the choir responded in Church Slavonic. Two years later when Fr. Basil Buchovecky was the pastor, an attempt to introduce English singing met with this reaction. Again it was the Little Litany. Fr. Basil began the litany with the first petition Again and again in peace let us pray to the Lord. There was silence. No response. Fr. Basil continued with the next petition, to which the choir responded Gospodi Pomilyui. Even though this attempt met with failure, Fr. Basil did not give up. He decided that on a particular Saturday morning at which no church services were scheduled, an all-English liturgy would be celebrated. The youth group would sing the responses. His wife, Ruth, was musical and taught us to sing the responses, using the English Divine Liturgy book written by Fr. Andrew Glagolev and published by the FROC. It was not too long after that first English Liturgy sung by our youth group that the choir began to sing in English. When I was a senior in high school, Fr. Macarius Targonsky was assigned as parish priest Fr. Targonsky had experience as a choir director and he appointed himself as teacher of the choir. Within a very short time, the choir was singing many more hymns of the Liturgy in English and had learned English music for a complete wedding service. During Fr. Nicholas Solak’s pastorate all services were totally done in English.
The difficult transition to the use of English in the Divine services was not unique to St. Mary’s in Osceola Mills. A Divine Liturgy music book in English, the work of Fr. Andrew Glagolev, was published by the Federated Russian Orthodox Clubs in 1948. I would like to read the complete introductory message written as a foreward to this book by Fr. Glagolev.
During the last few years, it is becoming more and more evident, with the departure of the founders and builders of our Russian Orthodox parishes in America from this life, that parochial responsibilities involving chorus participation, church reading and chanting, participation in administration, etc., are gradually coming into the hands of our American youth.
Our youth, having been educated in American schools, naturally know their secondary language, the Russian tongue, imperfectly. Thus many of them do not truly comprehend our church services, although the liturgical melodies are next to their hearts. For our youth grew up in the Church, singing in the church choir, and faithfully attending church services and the local parochial school. Yet we are now experiencing the inevitable trying time in our church life, when our American environment has necessitated the translation of parts of our church services into the English language.
Many such translations have been made, and I feel that it is not for us to praise or criticize them at this time. Every translator is right in his own way. However, up to this time, we possess no translation which would; 1) accurately fit Russian church melody, 2) be correct and conform with the official editions of our Liturgy and services in general.
With the official edition of the Divine Liturgy, (I speak of the accepted translation of Hapgood, in general) an attempt to accomplish points 1) and 2) has been discerned in this present volume; the melodies have been retained FULL Y. It is our hope that this volume of the DIVINE LITURGY of the Russian Orthodox Church in ENGLISH LANGUAGE may be beneficial as a handbook for our parochial schools in their work with Liturgical music (in the English language.) Celebrating the Holy Sacrifice of the Divine Liturgy or singing chosen parts of it in English must, of course, be sanctioned by the local pastors of the various parishes. We can only advise the youth to consult with their pastor in this matter. This present undertaking offers the less complex compositions, although there is an almost unlimited wealth of sacred music from which we can further profit in the future. We have ONLY BEGUN THIS WORK, and there is yet much to be done.
With the invoking of God’s blessing on you, the supporters of this work, we beseech you to remember those of our parents who still cherish dearly our Russian speech and Russian melodies. It will be as difficult for them to sacrifice our Russian lyrics as it is for you, the younger generation, to fully maintain them. Having sacrificed language—let us retain our traditional melodies.
That wonderful introduction tells us much about the very careful approach taken by the church in introducing English in the Russian Orthodox Church. First, we notice the absence of any reference to a missionary perspective. The reason for the introduction of English is that the children of the Russian immigrants, being trained in American schools, are not capable of speaking, reading, or understanding the language of their parents and grandparents. Thus, we are now experiencing the inevitable trying time when our American environment has necessitated the use of English in our church services. And this introduction of English must be done very carefully, with the full blessing and cooperation of the local pastors.
The second point stressed by Fr. Glagolev concerns the adequacy of the English translations. Although there are many translations that have been undertaken, none so far adequately fits the Russian melodies and none so far is “correct and conforms with the official editions of our Liturgy.” In his book Fr. Glagolev has used the Hapgood translation for it has been accepted. In his musical arrangements Fr. Glagolev states that “the melodies have been retained FULLY.” He concludes with a plea—“having sacrificed language, let us retain or traditional melodies.”
In perusing the book, one finds included among the selections compositions of Fr. Andrew Glagolev. These are not traditional Russian melodies, but new church compositions by one of the first Orthodox church composers writing in English for liturgical use.
This was not the first such endeavor. In 1938 Fr. Michael Gelsinger, a priest of the Syrian Orthodox Archdiocese, published a small book, Orthodox Hymns in English, which contained forty-five hymns in English. Included in the collection were the hymns for the Liturgy and selected pieces to “encourage some participation in singing Vespers and Orthros.” These adaptations of Fr. Gelsinger were based on traditional Russian settings of the tones, simple settings by Russian composers such as Bortniansky, Arkhangelsky, Dvoretsky etc, and modifications of the Greek melodies of Sakellarides.
Then in 1946, Archpriest Joseph Havriliak, using the English translations of Archpriest Michael Gelsinger, privately printed an “Orthodox Missal for Priest and Choir in English.” The music for the Liturgy was composed by Fr. Havriliak and, as stated in the Preface, was the first attempt to present a complete setting for an Orthodox Mass (sic) to be sung in English.” This work was dedicated not only “to the present and future generations of American-born and English-speaking children and faithful converts in our holy Faith, but more especially to the young generation of priests and singers and choir directors through whose efforts...the number and fervency of our converts shall be increased.” The book was approved and authorized for use by Metropolitan Benjamin, the Patriarchal Exarch for the Americas. There is little indication that this private publication ever had a wide distribution or use.
In 1950 the Syrian Antiochian Archdiocese published “Three Divine Liturgies in Music” for use in the churches of that archdiocese. Metropolitan Antony Bashir, who later was to become a very strong advocate for Orthodox unity in America, strongly believed that if his parishes were to exist in America, they would have to adopt the English language as the official language in which services were celebrated. The publication of this book was instrumental in putting into action the metropolitan’s desire. The book is interesting for two reasons. All the music in the book was prepared and arranged for four-voices by an Orthodox friend of the Syrians, Professor Michael Hilko who was the choir director at St. John the Baptist Russian Orthodox Church in Passaic, New Jersey. The first liturgy was in English and contained harmonizations by Professor Hilko. There were settings based on Byzantine melodies and Russian Bakhmetev tonal melodies. The Cherubic Hymn was Bortniasky’s Number 5. For the two Arabic liturgies that followed, Prof. Hilko was given the Arabic text in phoenetics and then someone sang the melodies to him. He reproduced them in western notation and then arranged them for four part harmony. Prof. Hilko’s music can still be heard in Antiochian churches. In fact, Fr. Lazor often remarks that he has to go to an Antiochian church to hear his favorite Russian church melodies.
In May, 1951, Bishop Fan Stylian Noli, of the Albanian Orthodox Church in America, published an “Eastern Orthodox Hymnal.” From the time he heard the Liturgy sung in the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in New York City in 1907, he had the desire to introduce Russian church music to “any congregation within my reach.” The hymnal was intended to make this music available to “all the Orthodox Christians in America who sooner or later will have to conduct their services in English.” The music was rendered according to the rhythm of the old Slavonic text in order to fit the various settings by the Russian composers. Also included in the book were several Byzantine hymns which Bishop Noli translated from the Greek and then arranged in four-part harmony.
I have just referred to church music in English published in the late 40’s and early 50’s of the past century that were more or less sanctioned for use by hierarchs of various jurisdictions in America. During this same period there were a number of choir directors who were adapting the Russian church settings of hymns into English for use by their choirs at local Orthodox churches scattered throughout the United States. Among the most active were the Soroka brothers: Fathers Igor and Vladimir Soroka in western Pennsylvania and Fr. Leonard in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Luke Bakoota in Bridgeport, Connecticut; Deacon Dzubay in Minneapolis, and Fr. Dimitry Ressetar and his sons, John in Cleveland, Ohio and Daniel in eastern Pennsylvania; Fr. Boris Geeza in the military; Fr. Daniel Hubiak in Detroit, Michigan; and Fr. Sergei Glagolev in Encino, California, to mention just a few. Priests who had been formerly choir directors before ordination also were trying their hand at adapting Russian music to English. Many settings painfully struggled to keep the Russian meter and syllable count in tact. For example, it was not unusual to see the first antiphon at the Liturgy begin in this way: the Slavonic, Blagoslvi dushe moya gospoda (10 syllables). and the corresponding English: Bless the Lord and worship Him, O my soul (10 syllables). Or the setting of Nicholas Brill in Indiana for the response of the litany: Gospodi pomilyui (6 syllables): Lord our God have mercy (6 syllables). However, by and large the translations used were those found in the Service Book of Isabel Hapgood. It was not unusual during the late 40’s and early 50’s, when English was being introduced in parishes of the Russian “Metropolia” that two services would be celebrated on Sunday morning. The service of the typika, called by many as “Pro-liturgy” would be sung in English and then a second service, the Divine Liturgy, would follow, celebrated in Church Slavonic. In Minneapolis where there were two priests, as in the Cathedral on 2nd street, an early English liturgy would be followed by a Slavonic Liturgy.
Most Orthodox Christians in America know the name of Isabel Hapgood but very few know much about her life and activities. Let me say just a few words about this really great benefactor of American Orthodoxy.
Isabel Hapgood was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on November 21, 1850 to EnglishScottish parents. A graduate of the famous women’s school in Farmington, Connecticut, she was especially gifted at languages, having mastered French, Latin, German, and then after graduation Russian, Polish, and Church Slavonic. She engaged a Russian lady to achieve fluency in spoken Russian. Even before her first visit to Russia in 1887 she had already published several translations from Russian into English including works by Tolstoy and Gogol. Hapgood’s translations of Russian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Polish literature appeared throughout the following years and almost up to the end of her life, including more works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, a 16-volume edition of Turgenev’s Novels and stories, Gorky’s novels, Chekhov’s The Seagull, and Leskov’s Cathedral Folk.
When she first came to Russia in 1887 she already had a reputation as a translator of Russian literary works. This reputation opened the doors to important persons and institutions in the Slavic world. She made the acquaintance of poets, writers, painters, composers, conductors and choirmasters. She got to know the Procurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantine Pobedonovtsev as well as several members of the higher clergy. She received invitations to Imperial ceremonies. She even attended a royal ball at the Winter Palace and she with her mother spent an entire summer at Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana.
Isabel Hapgood returned to Russian almost annually after that first visit. She was especially attracted to church institutions and she would visit the great cathedrals, monasteries and parish churches where she would collect materials for future work. She became close friends with bishops, clergy and church musicians. After attending a weekday Vespers at St Sophia’s Cathedral in Kiev, where she was especially moved by the singing of the male and boy’s choir, she wrote:
I stood among the pillars, a little removed from the principal aisle, one afternoon, near sunset, listening to the melodious intoning of the priest, the soft chanting of the week-day choir at vespers ... That simple music, so perfectly fitted for church use, will bring the most callous into a devotional mood long before the end of the services.
As a result of this experience she wanted to make the services and the beauty of the Orthodox liturgy available in English. This she began to do back in the United States. Archbishop Nicholas, Russian Orthodox bishop of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands, gave her a complete set of Church Slavonic books for her work. He was the first to see and to approve the arrangement of the services which she selected for her work. She worked eleven years on this project, during which time she received encouragement from Pobedonovtsev who had a sympathetic and practical interest in this endeavor. Much more important was the deep interest and practical advice that she received from Archbishop Tikhon during his appointment as head of the Russian Orthodox Mission to North America.
For her Service Book, Miss Hapgood used the church Slavonic texts as used by the Russian Orthodox Church at that time, often comparing them with the Greek. For the Scriptural readings she used the King James version of the Bible, and for the Psalms she used for the most part the book of Book of Common Prayer. Several places in the book were revised by the Cathedral priest, Father Alexander Hotovitzky, who was described by Isabel Hapgood as a “very able and thoroughly competent priest.” Even the Archbishop Tikhon made several revisions.
Financing for publication was received from several places. Archbishop Tikhon provided one thousand dollars from the Holy Synod. A two thousand dollar grant from the Russian Imperial Government was procured by the Russian Ambassador, Count Sergei Witte. St. Nicholas Cathedral covered the remaining costs by providing a loan of $6,000. For her work of eleven years, Miss Hapgood received an honorarium of $500. The Cathedral sold The Service Book for $4.00, with a twenty-five per cent discount for orders of ten or more copies.
The book was first published in 1906. A second edition was printed in 1922. Patriarch Tikhon sent this endorsement for this second addition: “Our Patriarchal Blessing be upon Our American flock, always so near to Our heart; and upon Our never-to-be-forgotten American friends, and unto you all. Our Patriarchal Blessing and prayerful greeting.”
As most of us are familiar with Miss Hapgood’s translations, I will not discuss the quality of them. Needless to say they were a significant improvement over earlier attempts such as the Rites and Ceremonies of the Greek Church in Russia, the work of John Glen King which was published in London in 1772, or the translations of the Horologion, the Oktoechos, and the General Menaion by the scholar, Nicholas Orloff, who occupied the chair of Professor of Russian at Oxford University. I can still remember Fr. Solak reading the troparia from Orloff’s translation of the Oktoechos at a Saturday Vigil in Manhattan. After we sang the 9th heirmos of Tone 7, Fr. Solak in a loud voice, started the troparion with Orloff’s translation: “Shut your mouths”; he never got to finish the rest of that troparion as all in the chapel couldn’t help but break out in a soft laughter…clearly, Hapgood’s translation was much better. After the second edition of 1922 was printed, six reprints of the Hapgood Service Book were issued by the Syrian Antiochian Archdiocese. Metropolitan Anthony Bashir, recommended her book and called it “an English-language classic of Orthodox church literature.”
Isabel Hapgood can be remembered not only for her translation of the Service Book. She was very interested in Russian Church music and was a real supporter of the church singing at St Nicholas Cathedral in New York City. Marina Ledkovsky wrote this about her endeavors in this area:
After the consecration of St. Nicholas Cathedral in New York in 1903, Hapgood was involved in organizing its choir. The generous financial backing of the great American philanthropist and admirer of Russian ecclesiastical music, Charles R. Crane, made it possible to invite the highly competent choirmaster, Ivan Timofeevich Gorokhov; Gorokhov came from Moscow, where he had been an assistant to Kastalsky at the Synodal Choir School. He brought with him six adult male singers; the boy voices came from the Russian colony in New York. At the insistence of Charles Crane, the choir was patterned on the famous Moscow Synodal Schoir, consisting of male voices only. Beginning in 1913, Hapgood assisted the choirmaster in the organization of public concerts, and her energetic support led to extraordinary success. She frequently accompanied the choir as a lecturer and publicized the group in magazines and newspapers. In her articles she expressed her wish for a strong foundation for the Orthodox Church in America through its “angelic” liturgical singing. This successful enterprise came to an end after the 1917 events, because the Holy Synod was no longer able to provide funds for its churches in America.
Although it was not until the 40’s that Orthodox music in English was published for specific use in the Orthodox Church, already at the end of the nineteenth century octavo editions of selected Russian church composers were being published for glee clubs, high school choruses and semi-professional oratorio societies. As early as 1891 The Lord’s Prayer from Tchaikovksy’s Liturgy was published by the G. Schirmer Music Company of Boston. At the beginning of the century representative works of almost every major Russian church composer were published in English by J. Fisher and Brother of New York, the Boston Music Company, and E. C. Schirmer Music Company of Boston, and G. Schirmer, Inc. of New York. School choruses used these for their concerts and Protestant, especially Episcopal, church choirs sang these selections as anthems at their worship services. However, there is very little indication that they were used for Orthodox church services. Many of the translations were quite inaccurate—some weren’t even translations but simply very liberal paraphrases of the original text. This is probably the main reason why were did not find acceptance and use by the Orthodox. Here is the text of the Cherubic Hymn as translated by Nathan Haskell Dole, set to the music of Mikhail Glinka, and published in 1927 by G. Shirmer.
Like glad Cherubim in heav’nly chorus, moulded fair in marv’lous form.
Who thrice holy songs and praises sing for aye to God, the blessed Trinity.
So we now far from our hearts do lay all our care,
ev’ry earth-born care from our hearts we lay.
Amen. We exalt the Lord of Creation, yea the Lord of Creation. Who reigneth high above the ranks of all the angels, unseen by keenest eyes of mortals. Halleluia, Halleluia, Halleluia.
I entered St. Vladimir’s in the fall of 1956, directly after completing high school. There were about six or seven students who were enrolled in college and seminary simultaneously. I was enrolled at Columbia College in New York City while living at the seminary and taking courses in both schools each semester. Little did I think that I would never leave St. Vladimir’s. That was the farthest thing from my mind. In fact, coming from such a small Pennsylvania town, I would count the days until my next break when I could leave New York City, which I called a concrete jungle, and return home to the country. But in the course of my student years this changed.
My memories of those very first years are very pleasant. I especially remember the warm, friendly relationship that we as seminarians had with our seminary professors. At that time the seminary did not have its own property but rented several apartments in Manhattan at 121 street and Broadway, directly across the street from Union Theological Seminary. It was not unusual for the professors who lived in that same apartment building to come into our apartments and simply talk to us in the evenings. We would also see them several times a day—in the elevator, on the street, at the grocery store—in addition to chapel services and lectures. The faculty was very close with the students. I think that was very good and beneficial to both students and faculty.
It was during the spring semester of my first year that I began to direct the seminary choir. Because our regular student director, John Kozak, was completing his studies at Columbia and had several evening courses, I would direct the choir at those services in his absence. Most of the daily services were sung in both English and Church Slavonic. The ordinary parts of the service, Gladsome Light, the Prokeimena, and the Litanies were sung in English. The propers, the changing parts of the services, the stichera on Lord I call, the Apostikha, and the Troparia, were mostly sung in Church Slavonic. Once a week the services were conducted in English and Greek, with the students of the Syrian Archdiocese, as it was called at that time, singing the responses in Byzantine chant.
For the most part, the music that was sung in English, was arranged by the former professor of church music at the seminary, Professor Leonid Troitsky. It would be fair to say that at that time it surely was not the seminary and its choir that had any kind of influence on the style of music that was being sung in our churches—just the opposite. It was a secular choir, the Don Cossack Choir and its very energetic director, Serge Jaroff that had a profound influence on the type of music selected and the way in which it was sung, or, as in many cases, tried to be sung, in so many churches of Slavic orientation. Serge Jaroff studied at the Moscow Synodal School of Church Singing and participated in the first public performance of Rachmaninoff’s Liturgy, which was sung by the Moscow Synodal Choir under Serge Danilin’s direction on November 25, 1910. Here is what Rachmaninoff wrote about that performance:
The Choir sang beautifully. For one number of the Liturgy, “We Praise Thee”, the whole Choir supplies a humming accompaniment for the solo of a boy soprano. At that performance the voice rang out in such crystalline, ethereal beauty against the rich, deep harmonies of the choral background that I experienced a moment of sheer delight. After the performance I asked to see the boy soloist. A shy, blushing lad was presented to me, and I patted him on the shoulder and thanked him for his exquisite singing. Years later, after a Berlin concert of the Don Cossacks, its very able conductor, Sergei Jaroff, was introduced to me and he said at once that he had already met me. I have a good memory for faces, but I could not recall him. “Where was it we met?” I asked, and he told me that he was the boy who had sung the soprano role in the Liturgy.
Not long after his graduation from the Moscow School, Jaroff, like so many others, joined the White Army and in 1920 we find him in a field near Istanbul in Turkey, where hungry Russian soldiers from the Don River Valley were encamped. Among the Cossack 6 foot giants was a small Cossack lieutenant, Serge Jaroff, considered by his enormous brothers too little to be of much use. One night it occurred to him that others might enjoy the choruses sung by his comrades who sang in the former regimental choirs. He selected the most impressive voices and wielded tenors, baritones, and basses into an ensemble. Within weeks he had a chorus of thirty men singing a repertoire assembled out of their capacious memories. Thus was born the Don Cossack Choir.
In the spring of 1921 they were shipped to a Greek island, Lemnos, where they sang with the Greek choir at the services held in the village church and gave open air concerts entertaining the occupying French and English troops. In 1923, after a concert given at Orthodox cathedral in Sophia, Bulgaria, one of the members of the congregation, a concert manager, sent them on their first tour. They traveled from continent to continent until 1939, when the Second World War broke out. All the members of the Chorus succeeded in escaping to America where they all became residents and received US citizenship. During the fall and winter of each year the choir would tour Europe, the spring would find them giving concerts in the United States, from the smallest of towns to the largest cities, and in summer they would be singing in the South American countries. They literally sang in every part of the world: Europe, Africa, India, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the North and South America. Overall, the group gave over 9,000 concerts.
In terms of conducting style, Jaroff wrote:
I feared that the choir would develop into a singing machine, so I tried to maintain a certain tension, with fine-tuning of familiar pieces and alterations of tempo. In this way I kept constant control, preventing the choir from falling into a set pattern.
OPEN TO ME THE DOORS OF REPENTANCE -Artemius Vedel’ (1772-1808)
This setting by Vedel was extremely popular and could be heard in many of our churches as a “concert number” sung at the Liturgy during the priest’s communion during the pre-Lenten and Lenten Sundays.
Especially when the seminary was located on Broadway in Manhattan, ordinations of students in the Russian “Metropolia” as the OCA was called, took place at the Holy Virgin Protection Cathedral on East 2nd Street in New York City. The Cathedral Choir was under the direction of Nicholas Afonsky. Prior to coming to the United States, Nicholas Afonsky was the director of the Metropolitan Choir in Paris, France. Nicholas Afonsky came to the United States at the invitation of the OCA church in South River, New Jersey and in the early 50’s accepted the offer of the Cathedral to become its choral director. Afonsky was a masterful choral conductor whose taste, style, and interpretation of church singing was probably reflective of the old St. Petersburg School. As director of the Cathedral Choir his influence of taste and performance of church music in America in the 50’s and 60’s cannot be underestimated.
AUGMENTED LITANY: Afonsky - Cathedral Choir
Hearing that Litany, one can see how a typical Liturgy at the Cathedral lasted over three hours, beginning at 10 and ending after 1 pm. That includes no communicants at the Sunday Eucharist. The fact that recordings of both the Don Cossack Chorus and the Cathedral Choir were available—Don Cossacks on the Decca label, the Cathedral Choir on the Westminster and Monitor labels—contributed much to the influence that these choirs had on the choir directors of our churches at that time.
When I arrived at the seminary in 1956, the professor of liturgical music at St. Vladimir’s was Boris Mikhailovitch Ledkovsky who was appointed to that position in 1952. Born in 1894, the son of Protopresbyter Michael Ledkovsky who was the Inspector (dean) at the Theological Seminary in Novo-Cherkassk, Boris Ledkovsky began his secondary education at the Novocherkassk Theological Seminary, where, as he wrote later “there were many useful courses in music for future choir conductors. Choral singing was taught so well that a musically gifted person graduated as an excellently trained choirmaster.”
Following graduation from secondary school Boris Ledkovsky enrolled at the Moscow Conservatory where he studied theory, composition, counterpoint and voice training. Among his professors were Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, who was the director of the Conservatory at that time, and Alexander Kastal’sky, the noted composer, choral director, and future director of the Moscow Synodal School of Church Music, located directly across the street from the Conservatory. Kastal’sky was also the choir director of the Uspenskii Cathedral located in the Kremlin. Ledkovsky possessed an extremely magnificent contra-bass voice and sang in the choirs directed by Kastal’sky. He often told me that it was Kastal’ sky and the Moscow Synodal School that had a great influence on his musical tastes, his church compositions, and his directing style.
Ledkovsky volunteered for service in the White Army and after its demobilization, he moved to Sophia, Bulgaria where he was appointed director at the Russian Embassy Church and then as director of the St Alexander Nevskii Cathedral Choir and simultaneously choirmaster at the Sophia State Opera. From 1937 until the beginning of the war in 1941, he toured all over Germany with his own male choir, the Black Sea Cossacks. Following the war he was conductor of the Berlin Resurrection Cathedral Choir and also toured Germany with his newly-founded mixed choir, simply called the “Russian Cathedral Choir.” Fleeing persecution in Berlin from the Soviets, he fled to the Western section in 1948 where he reorganized the “Black Sea Cossack Choir” and toured throughout Germany and the Scandinavian countries.
He and his family (wife and three children) arrived in America in 1951. In 1952 he was appointed choir director at the Synod Cathedral in New York City where the ruling primate was Metropolitan Anastassy In 1953 he joined the faculty of St. Vladimir’s Seminary as professor of liturgical music.
Professor Ledkovsky spoke very little English and in my second year of studies, in 1957, I became his assistant, helping with choir rehearsals and the first year course in church singing. As a choral director his manner of conducting was quite reserved and one might say, elegant. He never allowed himself to take liberties in front of the choir. He stood very erect, using a very narrow conducting plane, limiting his hand movements mostly to simple vertical “strokes,” keeping an extremely strict rhythm. Never did I see excessive swinging of arms, emotional gestures and other eccentricities often used by most choral “maestros.” His gestures were very limited and when used, quite refined. This style went hand in hand with the style of the music for which he became so well known. With our seminary choir he often became frustrated when we would sing “flat”—podnizhaet as he would repeat over and over. In order to keep us on pitch, he would often raise the pitch from one tone to tones higher than called for by the composition. Most of the time, at least according to his facial expressions, this “choral technique” worked. Of course, all of us were singing, standing on our tip toes with eyebrows raised. I sang baritone and I remember remarking after one concert that I sang half of the program in falsetto.
Professor Ledkovsky had a positive influence in changing the style of church singing in the Orthodox Churches in America. He was an ardent follower of the Moscow School of Music and strove first and foremost to purify choral singing from the popular compositions of the so-called Italian school of Russian church composers. This is what predominated in most of the churches following the Slavic musical tradition. Such compositions were overly elaborate musical settings which called attention to themselves by overemphasizing certain elements at the expense of others equally important. Often distorted were the meanings of words or phrases by the attempt to achieve an emotional musical effect. The works of the Russian composers who followed the “Italian” school (Vedel’, Deghtarev, Davydov, Turchaninov, Bortniansky, etc.) are adorned with arioso solos, bold or daring passages of extraordinary leaps or runs, trills, and grace notes; in general all of those vocal devices which gave the greatest possibilities for a vocal soloist to display his or her beautiful, voluminous, and cultivated voice. Such works greatly encouraged a subjective interpretation. The religious idea was certainly animated but the required correspondence of text to music was clearly lacking.
The archpriest Dmitry Razuvmovsky summed up the works of such composers in this way: “Not one of these works proved to be perlect and edifying in a church sense, because in each work the music predominates over the text, most often not at all expressing its meaning.” It is quite surprising that even today many of the works of such composers have not only survived but still can be heard on any given Sunday in the cathedrals and city churches throughout Russia today. Even though Kastal’sky and the other composers associated with the Moscow Synodal School wrote compositions quite different from those referred to above, many Russian choir directors in America refused to sing the works of Kastal’sky because he, after the close of the School, became an employee of the Bolshevik government, devoting the rest of his life to folk songs and the so-called “work” songs for the proletariat.
In his compositions, Boris Ledkovsky attempted to convey what he so often referred to as “tserkovnost’”, i.e, churchly. And, like the teachers of the Moscow Synodal School, Ledkovksy believed that such “tserkovnost’” can be found in the old Russian chants. Like his teacher Kastal’sky, Ledkovsky helped to establish a new tradition here in America in church music by returning to the indigenous Russian church unison melodies and using those melodies as the basis for the composing of church music, very much in the way that western composers used the Gregorian chant melodies as cantus firrni for their polyphonic compositions. However, here Ledkovsky was also influenced by Ivan Gardner, who maintained that the church chants are the “canonical” melodies that are acceptable for use in church and these follow more stringent rules regarding text and music. At no time should music predominate over text. Repetition of words, not found in the chant settings, distorts the meaning of the text and should not be tolerated. In his harmonized settings of church chants, Ledkovsky followed such precepts.
Ledkovsky composed his own All-Night Vigil, replacing Bakhmetev and taking as his basis for his arrangements the Znamenny and Kievan tonal chants. His tonal melodies for stikhera were arranged in close harmony, thus making them accessible for performance by small church choirs, even limited to four singers. In his “Obikhod” he preserved the original chant melody. He also subordinated the musical measure to the text and made every attempt not to sacrifice the sense or stress in a word or phrase in order to accommodate the musical measure. This fundamental church rule was neglected by Russian composers too frequently in the last two centuries in which the sacred texts were frequently sacrificed to the rhythm and dramatic melodic harmonizations of the music. Ledkovsky’s “Obikhod” was published in 1959 and selections from it became a regular feature of the seminary’s choral repertoire. It also was the standard for the Vigil heard weekly at the Synodal Cathedral in New York City, although Professor Ledkovsky often complained to me that Metropolitan Anastassy liked Bortniansky and, even though he felt that Bortniansky music was not good “tserkovnaya muzyka” (church music), he felt obliged to sing it in order to please the metropolitan. We now hear a recording of the Synodal Choir directed by Ledkovsky as it sings his arrangement of “Blessed is the Man,” Kievan chant.
BLESSED IS THE MAN - Kievan Chant, B. Ledkovsky, Synodal Choir
The seminary male choir gave several concerts of liturgical music in the late 50’s and early 60’s with Boris Ledkovksy directing. It is truly amazing how he was able to bring the level of the choir’s singing to the point that it could give concerts. Because of the style of singing and of Ledkovsky’s strong beliefs that church music must be “churchly,” oftentimes the comments heard from those who attended such concerts ranged from “Everything sounded the same”; “Why don’t you select numbers that are different?”; or “It was like a two-hour church service.” Those who understood music and could appreciate good choral singing often commented on the blend of the choir. This is what pleased Professor Ledkovksy the most—individual voices were not displayed; it was as though one voice was singing in four parts.
In 1961 the first recording by the seminary choir was produced. Boris Ledkovsky directed and, for the most part, the selections were settings of chant done by Ledkovsky plus a few of his own compositions.
GLORY TO GOD IN THE HIGHEST - Znamenny Chant, B. Ledkovsky, SVS Male Choir
In 1961 Fr. John Meyendorff encouraged me to study on a more serious level the history of Orthodox church music and introduced me to Prof. Milos Velimirovic, a Serbian Orthodox professor at Yale University who was giving a course on Byzantine music. I traveled to New Haven every other week, took the course on Byzantine music, and then would spend the afternoon meeting with Prof. Velimirovic in his office. Over tea we would discuss many aspects of Orthodox church music. He would tutor me in the history of this music and I would explain to him the structure and the meaning of the liturgical services, of which he had little knowledge or understanding. It was Prof. Velimirovic who guided me in my thesis on the early Slavic kondakaria from which sprang my real thirst to delve much deeper into the old Russian chant and the scholarly studies on this music done by Russian musicologists at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.
I might take this opportunity to mention two other musicologists who I have been fortunate to have met during my younger days at the seminary, both of whom were friends of Professor Boris Ledkovsky and who were admirers of his compositional talents.
I met Professor Alfred Swan in the late 1950’s at a lecture which he presented at the then St. Seraphim’s Church in Upper Manhattan. Swan, a British-born musicologist who taught at Swarthmore and Haverford Colleges, spent his life studying the old Russian chants and the Russian folk-songs and in his compositions used harmonizations that were drawn from the intonations of the village folk-singers. His ideas concerning the relationship of the two are contained in his book, Russian Music and its Sources in Chant and Folk-Song, published posthumously in 1973.
I met Dr. Johann von Gardner (1898-1983), eminent Russian-born musicologist, in 1965 when Barbara and I visited my brother who was in the military and stationed in Germany. He held the chair of Russian Liturgical Music at the University of Munich and I had the pleasure of spending one afternoon in his apartment discussing Russian chant. The author of two scholarly books and over 300 articles on liturgical music, Gardner was especially as well as several major scholarly books. Gardner was especially fond of Ledkovsky and dedicated his original composition of the Beatitudes to him and the St. Vladimir’s Seminary Choir.
It was in the summer of 1956, two months before I came to seminary, that Fr. Georges Florovsky had just left St Vladimir’s and began to teach at Harvard. He was replaced by Fr Alexander Schmemann who was appointed as vice-dean of the seminary. Fr. Schmemann was truly a remarkable man and an exceptional leader. I can still remember the lectures given by Fr. Schmemann. There was nothing more exciting than going to one of his church history lectures—it was almost like going to the movies. He made ancient church history come alive. All of our professors, Fathers Schmemann and Meyendorff and Professors Verhovskoy, Kesich, Arseniev, Bogolepov, etc. were able to convey to us not only their knowledge but their deep conviction that Orthodoxy was not a treasure that was to be just preserved but that it was a power, a force that should be taught and preached to the modem world. Because of their commitment and zeal one couldn’t help but feel that our teachers were in touch with God, and they were able to convey that sort of holy relationship to us.
I completed my first year at St Vladimir’s without incident and when I returned after my first summer break, I was asked to be the student director of the seminary choir. Of course, they really had no other choice. Even though I had very little experience, both FI. Schmemann and Professor Verhovsky who served as dean of students, expressed confidence that I could do the job and promised to give me as much help as possible. And when I said that I would want to sing English as much as possible and that I wanted all students to sing in the choir and participate in the Lenten Sunday visits to parishes, they agreed to support me in these efforts. I still remember the night before our first parish visit. I don’t think I slept for five minutes, as throughout the entire night I was giving pitches to myself and “worrying” about all sorts of possible breakdowns by the tenors, baritones, and basses. I became very close to Professor Ledkovsky and can remember so vividly how, when I would excitedly show him some piece of music that I had heard and was asking him why we shouldn’t sing it, he would look at me, shake his head, and simply reply, “Ny, David, eto ne tserkovno” (But, David, this is not churchly).
In 1959 the Seminary inaugurated a special program for the training of psalm readers and choir directors. This program was certified by the New York State Board of Regents. We have the first graduate of that program, Michael Pilat, here as a participant at this year’s institute.
In 1962, just before the seminary was getting ready to move to Crestwood, a second recording was released by the choir, this time, however, I directed and the bulk of the recording was the music in English for Great Vespers.
BLESS THE LORD -- Kievan Chant, B. Ledkovsky, arr. Drillock
During my latter years as a student there were two issues of musical interpretation which occupied many of my thoughts and discussions with Professor Ledkovsky—blend and tempo. Ledkovsky went to great pains attempting to achieve what he would call a “church blend,” a sound that would not draw the worshipper’s attention to either the music or the voices that were executing the music. This led one opera singer to comment that there is no identifiable “sound” of the choir—all the voices are so hushed that it deprives the singer of singing in a “natural” way, thus the sound produced by the seminary choir is unnatural and not at all beautiful. In the late fifties a patron of Russian church music, Ladd Johnson, visited the seminary and insisted that I listen to a recording of a choir from Russia. That recording was the All-Night Vigil of Sergei Rachmaninoff, sung by the USSR Academic Russian Choir under the direction of Alexander Sveshnikov, a People’s Artist of the USSR. I was simply infatuated with that recording and from that day on I knew what kind of choral blend on which to set my sights.
BOGORODITSE DEVO – S. Rachmaninov, Alexander Sveshnikov, dir.
It was through a recording that my question regarding appropriate tempo for church singing was resolved. The choir of Petyr Pyotrozhinsky of the Synod Church in Paris had issued a recording of the Saturday Vigil. The selections were very simply, probably the same music that was sung by the ordinary choir at the weekly Saturday Vigils. I was particularly taken aback by the way the choir sang “From my youth.” The tempo in contrast with what was heard in our American churches would have to be called “faster than fast.” And yet when I listened to the recording I was amazed how clearly the words were executed—every syllable could easily be understood. Even at that time when the seminary choir sang in what I would call a slow to moderate tempo, students upon hearing the choir for the first time would complain that we are singing too fast and it is impious—not conducive to prayer. I think that it was this recording that enabled me to work at singing a bit faster and giving more attention to clear pronunciation.
FROM MY YOUTH - Valaam Chant, P. Potorjinsky
One of Professor Verhovskoy’s responsibilities as dean of students was to make sure that all of us students were in our rooms by 11 pm. Many times he would come to the apartment around 10 pm and spend the hour until 11 talking to us in a most informal way. He would speak mostly about “feology” but at times he would also talk about his experiences as a student at St. Sergius Institute in Paris, France. When he would speak with me, he often spoke about music. He once told me of his experiences as a bass singer in the choir and with real delight told of how one vacation period the student choir at St Sergius went on tour, singing at the services and presenting concerts in Orthodox churches throughout Western Europe. I would like to play a recording of the stikheron apostikha for the Sunday before Christmas, House of Ephratha, sung by the St. Sergius Institute choir, Michael Ossorguine as canonarch. This is especially interesting in view of the fact that this Institute is devoting sessions to the Slavic podoben melodies.
O HOUSE OF EPHRATHA - St Sergius Institute Choir, M. Ossorguine (1956)
Professor Verhovskoy’s story about that vacation tour of the St. Sergius choir came back to me in January of 1961 when I got together eight students to give a short program of music at St. Seraphim’s Church in Manhattan. As it was during the winter break, only a few students were at the seminary, mostly those who were simultaneously enrolled in college. After the program, on our way back to the seminary, we remarked how well we sounded and the idea of a tour throughout America came to my mind. The next day I spoke with Professor Verhovskoy and Fr. Schmemann about this. The result was the organization of the first summer octet. Fr. Alexander making calls to priests according to an itinerary that Alexander Doumouras and I put together. Fr. Doumouras was the economos, Fr. Hopko the preacher, Oleg Olas the driver, etc. {Fr. Lazor and Kucynda, Fr Hopko and Alexander Doumouras, Stephen Kopestonsky and Oleg Olas, Peter Tutko and I as director and leader. That summer of 1962 the Octet from St. Vladimir’s Seminary visited some 80 parishes throughout the United States, going as far west as Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The following summer a second Octet traveled to the west coast. The Octets were instrumental for several reasons: 1) public relations 2) student recruitment 3) fund raising and 4) promoting liturgical music done well in English in a style that was more conducive to worship than the concert stage. Each Octet also transported with them a bookstore of materials—books, records, icons—that were little known to thousands of Orthodox and non-Orthodox who attended the services and concerts given at local churches by the Summer Octet.
Already as a result of the annual Lenten visits to parishes on the east coast and the annual concerts which we gave in New York City, and especially by the lectures given by Fr. Alexander throughout the entire country in churches and college campuses, an awareness that liturgical worship and church singing were not only vestiges of an “ancient, colorful rite” but something that was relevant and meaningful to contemporary life was beginning to take hold.
Then, in 1964 a recording of the Divine Liturgy in English with Prof Ledkovsky directing was made. The choir was recognized, as one reviewer for the New York Times put it, as “almost a professional chorus” and among church people, it was known not only for its “prayerful” renditions of church music but also as the choir most responsible in America for arousing interest in the ancient liturgical chants of the Russian Orthodox Church.
TROPARION - Tone 4, Greek Chant, B. Ledkovsky (in English) SVS Male Choir
At this time Prof. Ledkovsky’s work at St. Vladimir’s was limited to one rehearsal a week. He also continued to compose music for the choir, which Professor Drillock would adapt to English. He was commissioned by the school to write a “Vespers,” which in turn was adapted for English and published by St. Vladimir’s in 1976. Prof. Ledkovsky never saw the published work as he died in 1975.
Father Alexander’s reputation for his work in liturgical theology and in articulating a vision for Orthodox worship in America was becoming more and more widespread. As one alumnus priest has written:
Many liturgical practices that we in the Orthodox Church in America have come to regard as “everyday” were, in fact, not common here prior to Fr. Alexander. The practice of frequent communion, evening Presanctified Liturgies, General Confession, and the reading aloud of the Eucharistic Prayers have become the norm in many parishes. Other practices, such as Baptismal Liturgies, are still in development.
Fr. Alexander did not consider himself a “liturgical innovator,” he neither created or improvised a liturgical theology, What he strongly believed in, and this can be found over and over again in so many of his writings, was that the most clearly accessible expression of the Orthodox faith and its teachings can be found in its liturgical life, and that it is in worship, in Orthodox liturgy, that the real purpose of man’s existence is being revealed.
Perhaps what most people do not realize is how much Fr. Alexander knew and appreciated church singing, He was familiar with most of the so-called classics of Russian church composers and especially looked forward to hearing Turchaninov’s Vercheri Tvoeya” (Of Thy Mystical Supper) of Holy Thursday, Tebe Odeyushagocya of Holy Friday and Da Molchit (Let all mortal flesh keep silent) of Holy Saturday. It was always amusing to hear him give the pitch to the clergy to sing “Come let us worship” at the Liturgy and then begin on a different pitch from what he gave. But on a more serious note, he would often speak about the importance of hymnology in Orthodox worship and how our hymns were the “key” to knowing and understanding the theology of the church. This is how Fr. Schmemann expressed it in his memoirs:
Bright Tuesday, May 1, 1973. Pascha. Holy Week. Essentially, bright days such as are needed. And truly that is all that is needed. I am convinced that if people would really hear Holy Week, Pascha, the Resurrection, Pentecost, the Dormition, there would be no need for theology. All of theology is there. All that is needed for one’s spirit, heart, mind and soul. How could people spend centuries discussing justification and redemption? It is all in these services. Not only is it revealed, it simply flows in one’s heart and mind. The more I live, the more I am convinced that most people love something else and expect something else from religion and in religion.
We read how much he enjoyed the singing.
Monday, April 16, 1973. I remember the Akathist on Friday evening and the Liturgy on Saturday. While we were having communion in the altar, the choir was singing “Hail, Mary, whose joy is radiant.” The choir sang beautifully and the whole service was like rain on my heart after a drought.
But perhaps nothing more sums up Fr. Alexander’s love for liturgical worship and the interrelationship between the theology and the hymnology. Father Alexander Schmemann gives a vivid description of the power that song in worship had on his own personal experience of faith. He wrote:
Thousands of theological and philosophical books have been written about faith, and indeed, there are rational and scientific principles which apply....But no step by step explanation can match the vigil on the eve of the Annunciation when finally, after the service’s lengthy development, the long awaited hymn “With the voice of the archangel we cry to Thee, O pure one” is sung. At that moment the whole world, with all its suffering and torment, with all its weariness and evil, with its jealousy, pettiness, and emptiness, suddenly is purified and begins to radiate a Spring that is truly beyond this world. Is this just emotionalism, is it some kind of mental breakdown or self-hypnosis? No, human beings have forgotten the truth about the world, about life, about human nature, about the soul’s purity and its first-created purpose. But at that moment, the truth breaks through, and suddenly we know once again that it is possible to breathe openly and fill our lungs with the pure air of heaven, of spirit, of love. In that moment, and others like it, something is revealed which impels me to say with boundless conviction: yes, this is truth, this is beauty, and nothing on earth compares to it. In that moment, I know that heaven has descended to earth, and that the soul has found what it has thirsted for and sought so blindly and painfully.
It was with the purpose of relating Orthodox liturgical theology with Orthodox practice that the first summer Institute of Liturgical Music and Pastoral Practice was organized by the Seminary in 1978. I remember planning the program together with Fr. Schmemann and Fr. Glagolev whom we co-opted to organize this first summer Institute. The Summer Institute has been held continuously for 27 years and has brought almost two thousand of Orthodox pastors, choir directors, singers, and lay persons interested in theology to the seminary campus for one week of intensive study, prayer, and fellowship. The Institute has given the seminary an opportunity to present its understanding of the relationship between music and theology, especially liturgical theology, to not only seminarians enrolled at the school but to a much wider population, the choir directors and singers who are actually responsible for the music as it is sung in our churches.
In 1970 the teaching of Byzantine music was added to the seminary’s curriculum and four years later two courses in Serbian church chant. Fr. Sergei Glagolev was added to the faculty as a teacher of composition. Mark Bailey replaced Fr. Sergei when he had to retire because of illness. Mrs. Erickson joined the faculty as a teacher of conducting and lecturer in the history of Byzantine music and notation. Conducting courses were regularly offered in the evening as part of the extension program and many laypersons interested in becoming choir directors enrolled in these courses. As a result of these additions, in 1985 the Board of Regents gave the seminary the right to offer the degree of Master of Arts to those students who successfully completed the music program.
At the time when the seminary inaugurated the Summer Institute, the use of English as the language of worship was no longer a major issue. Two themes that I think have been particularly emphasized in the Institute’s music section over the years relate to the role of the choir and the singer in liturgical prayer and the form and function of the components of liturgical worship and their implications for church music.
The music faculty of the Institute have continuously emphasized that the singers have a specific liturgical function. Along with the bishop, the priest, the deacon, and the reader, the singer is a co-minister at the liturgy. Singers are not present just for the sake of replacing the congregation in singing hymns or, as one theologian has put it, for “praying” on behalf of the congregation. They are leaders of the congregation and, as indicated in the rite of the ordination of a chanter, they have a teaching responsibility. It is unfortunate that in the 17th century in southwestern Rus’ upstairs galleries were constructed over the western entrance to the Orthodox churches for the purpose of placing the choirs in these balconies, in imitation of the western practice. The change in the physical place of the choir—from the kliros located in front of the ikonostasis to the upstairs balcony in the rear of the church—emphasized the change in the understanding of the choir director and the singer, from that of a leader and teacher of the congregation to that of a musical performer for the enhancement of the service.
Almost all institutes have included lectures for the music participants devoted to the various components of our liturgy. There are differences of both form and function of the litany, the Cherubic Hymn, the troparion, the stikheron, and psalmody which have implications in their corresponding musical form, style, and manner of performance.
In order to encourage the “restoration” of Orthodox liturgical services in parishes, a program was put in place consisting of the following: Fr. Alexander energetically spent as much time as he could teaching, preaching and publishing—regular articles in St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, the pamphlet Holy Week, and the books Introduction to Liturgical Theology, Great Lent, Of Water and the Spirit, the Eucharist, etc. Together with Fr. Alexander’s writings, the seminary’s press undertook the publication of liturgical music books and the recording of music for such services.
Not many people today remember the time when Holy Saturday was the day on which priests made house to house calls blessing Easter baskets. That wonderful service that Fr. Alexander referred to as the climax of the liturgical year was little known. In order to make better known the wonderful music of that service and to encourage its restoration in the parish cycle of holy week services, the seminary male choir made a recording of selected hymns—Great and Holy Saturday, Orthodox Liturgical Music. At the same time work began on the publication of a series of music books for the Lenten and Holy Week season. In 1972 the sixth recording of music sung by the seminary choir, The Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts was released. The following year, 1973, SVS Press released Holy Week, Volume 1, The Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts. Then in 1977 the seminary choir produced its next recording, Pascha and in 1980 SVS Press released the Pascha music book. Holy Week, Volume 2 was released in 1983. These were cooperative endeavors in which I was greatly assisted by both John and Helen Erickson and so many students who had musical abilities—student directors of the choir, composers, and singersjust interested in helping to provide the church with liturgical music in English.
THE ANGEL CRIED - Balakirev, arr. Erickson, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Male Choir
It was that recording and its inclusion in the Pascha book that has contributed to its very widespread use in so many of our Orthodox churches to this day. In the fall of 1978 a mixed choir was organized at the seminary consisting of some 80 singers, students of the seminary and alumni from the metropolitan New York area. Called St. Vladimir’s Liturgical Chorale, this group produced two recordings; Orthodox Hymns of Christmas which was recorded in 1979 and The Divine Liturgy of the Orthodox Church which was produced in 1982. All of the selections recorded in this second recording were included in the music book, The Divine Liturgy, which was printed and released by the Press in that same year, 1982.
WE MAGNIFY - B. Ledkovsky, arr. Drillock, St Vladimir’s Liturgical Chorale
I would like to conclude my presentation with a few closing remarks. Over the past fifty years there has been quite a transformation in the Orthodox Church worship here in America. And I feel that I have been most fortunate with the role that God has given me at St. Vladimir’s. There is no doubt that the Seminary is a busy. However, all of the activity that has taken place here has only one purpose, one goal—to serve the Church. This is why the Chapel is in fact the center, the heart of the seminary. It is here that we gather daily to offer our work to Christ and to give thanks for all that He has given to us. And God truly has given us so much for which to be grateful.
So many times alumni when asked what they remember most about seminary life answer that it is the chapel and the liturgical services that they not only remember the most but also miss the most. The services of Holy Week and Pascha, the baptism of a new-born child, the marriage of a student, the ordination of a deacon, a priest, and the burial of a dear professor ... these will be the memories that I will cherish the most.
On Sunday, March 21, 2021, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Alumnus Dn. Phillip Beiner was ordained to the holy priesthood. His Eminence, Archbishop Alexander (Golitzin), presided over the ordination at St. George Orthodox Cathedral, Rossford, OH.
Father Phillip, a priest of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) currently serves St. John the Merciful Mission, Kissimmee, FL, and has been assigned to The Orthodox Church of St. Stephen the Protomartyr, Longwood, FL.
Father Phillip graduated from St. Vladimir’s Seminary with a Master of Divinity degree in 2020. Before seminary, he worked as an attorney. He also holds a B.A. in history from the University of South Florida and a J.D. from the University of New Hampshire School of Law.
May God grant the newly ordained Priest Phillip, Matushka Amanda, and their children, Katherine, Sebastian, and Anastasia, many years!
I regret that I never had the opportunity to meet Fr Alexander in person, but it is surely a testament to his scholarship, writing, and penetrating thought that he managed to make such an impact upon me nevertheless. We missed each other by sixty miles and one year. I began my studies at Yale the year before he died, and had I known how important he would become to me, I would surely have made that drive down I-95 to St. Vladimir’s Seminary to say thanks in advance. By outside arithmetic, his life was symmetrically simple: thirty years in Europe (1921–1951) and thirty-two years in America (1951–1983), but the impact of a life is not determined by such exterior markers. No one’s is, because our souls are bigger than our biographies. And in Fr. Alexander’s case, besides the secret record of his spiritual biography (the one kept by God and his wife and family) a public record is available because he was a scholar who left a trail of writings to let latecomers meet him, latecomers like myself then, and perhaps you, the reader, now. This celebration of the centennial of his birth offers you that invitation.
Most of the academic world has marked his trail of writings with signposts saying “liturgical studies,” and “liturgical renewal,” and “liturgical theology.” After all, his first book was titled Introduction to Liturgical Theology. And these were the signposts that led me toward him, since they seemed to name my intended subject of graduate study. I had developed plans to dissect the liturgy using the utensils of systematic theology I had brought with me. But in a directed reading course with Fr. Aidan Kavanagh during my first semester, we read everything by Fr. Alexander we could fit into that semester, and the different approach he took proved to be a Copernican Revolution for me. He did not approach liturgy as something for academic theologians to tinker with. He rather approached liturgy as a source for theology itself—the ontological condition for theology, in his words.
I tell people that the rest of my graduate education was spent trying to get the number of the bus that hit me.
It struck me forcefully when I read, “In the approach which I advocate by every line I ever wrote, the question addressed by liturgical theology to liturgy and to the entire liturgical tradition is not about liturgy but about ‘theology,’ i.e. about the faith of the Church as expressed, communicated and preserved by the liturgy.”[i]
This inserted the “jaws of life” into the concept I had of liturgical theology, and opened a horizon beyond history and liturgics. The man to whom so many turn when they intend to study the evolution of rite, rubric, piety, cult, symbol, and liturgiology instead states, adamantly, that the real question addressed by liturgical theology is not about liturgy but about theology. Could liturgical theology be about something more than academically sponsored ritual naval gazing?
The thesis was confirmed multiple times the further I read. He denied seeing his mission as one of preparing grounds for a reform, or finding the “essence” of the liturgy, or relegating accessories to their place. Then, as if sensing the exasperation of readers who expected nothing more than this, he concludes:
Finally one may ask: but what do you propose, what do you want? To this I will answer without much hope, I confess, of being heard and understood: we need liturgical theology, viewed not as a theology of worship and not as a reduction of theology to liturgy, but as a slow and patient bringing together of that which was for too long a time and because of many factors broken and isolated – liturgy, theology, and piety, their reintegration within one fundamental vision. In this sense liturgical theology is an illegitimate child of a broken family. It exists, or maybe I should say it ought to exist, only because theology ceased to seek in the lex orandi its source and food, because liturgy ceased to be conducive to theology.[ii]
He repeats this several other places. Liturgical theology is reuniting three verities that we have let isolate: liturgy, theology, and piety. We do so by recovering leitourgia as lex orandi.
The goal of liturgical theology, as its very name indicates, is to overcome the fateful divorce between theology, liturgy and piety – a divorce which, as we have already tried to show elsewhere, has had disastrous consequences for theology as well as for liturgy and piety. It deprived liturgy of its proper understanding by the people, who began to see in it beautiful and mysterious ceremonies in which, while attending them, they take no real part. It deprived theology of its living source and made it into an intellectual exercise for intellectuals. It deprived piety of its living content and term of reference.[iii]
This divorce has damaged each member. These bricks should make up the house in which we live our Christian life, but we instead find a pile of rubble because the bricks are not connected. Separate liturgy from theology and piety, and we get human ritual; separate theology from liturgy and piety, and we get a religious philosophy; separate piety from liturgy and theology and we get idiosyncratic religiosity.
So if the question addressed by liturgical theology to the entire liturgical tradition is not about liturgy but about theology, what does liturgical theology talk about? And he answers God, cosmos, and humankind. All theology is eucharistic, but the eucharist is not the only things theology talks about. Liturgical theology turns us outward to God’s saving relationship with humanity in the cosmos. I have favorite passages concerning each.
First, regarding humanity. Man and woman were created as cosmic priests. “All rational, spiritual and other qualities of man, distinguishing him from other creatures, have their focus and ultimate fulfillment in this capacity to bless God, to know, so to speak, the meaning of the thirst and hunger that constitutes his life. ‘Homo sapiens,’ ‘homo faber’ … Yes, but, first of all, ‘homo adorans.’ The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest.”[iv] The failure to act liturgically in our daily lives led me to imagine the fall as a forfeiture of our liturgical career.
Second, regarding cosmology. We did violence to the world and to religion when we abandoned our post as priest. Instead of sacrificer, man became consumer. “The first consumer was Adam himself. He chose not to be priest but to approach the world as consumer: to ‘eat’ of it, to use and to dominate it for himself, to benefit from it but not to offer, not to sacrifice, not to have it for God and in God. And the most tragical fruit of that original sin is that it made religion itself into a ‘consumer good’ meant to satisfy our ‘religious needs,’ to serve as a security blanket or therapy, to supply us with cheap self-righteousness and equally cheap self-centered and self-serving ‘spiritualities.’”[v]
Third, regarding God’s teleological guidance of the Church. This is the true context for understanding leitourgia. It is less a ritual term and much more an eschatological term. “One can say that the uniqueness, the radical novelty of the new Christian leitourgia was here, here, in this ‘entrance’ into the Kingdom which for ‘this world’ is still ‘to come,’ but of which the Church is truly the sacrament: the beginning, the anticipation, and the ‘parousia.’”[vi] A leitourgia is the work of a few on behalf of the many, he says—and this would mean joining the work of the Trinity in preparing the world for fulfillment. As the leitourgia of ancient Israel “was the corporate work of a chosen few to prepare the world for the coming of the Messiah” the leitourgia of the Church itself is “a calling to act in the world after the fashion of Christ, to bear testimony to him and his kingdom.”[vii]
There are many other payoffs to this shift from standing over liturgy as a human product to standing under leitourgia as a work of God. In every liturgical celebration the Kingdom of God is revealed and made known to the Church gathered on the eighth day to eat and drink at Christ’s table. We are immersed in the new aeon of the Spirit. So his idea of “liturgical piety” and living a liturgical life is not infatuated piety for the liturgy. This is much too thin, though it is what many people assume. “It is true that many still do not understand the real nature of the liturgical movement. Everything is still fettered by the categories of ‘school theology.’ It is thought that this is nothing more than a new awakening of an aesthetically religious, psychological enthusiasm for cultus, for its ceremonial and ritual, for its external aspects; a sort of new liturgical pietism.”[viii] No, liturgical piety is the Church-at-liturgy already living eschatologically, and drawing the world into this life, too. Liturgical piety is the mysterion showing up in our lives. The Church’s assigned mission, her leitourgia, is to witness to the transforming effects of the Kingdom of God by being transformed herself.
I am still catching the number of that bus that hit me four decades ago.
[i] Alexander Schmemann, “Liturgical Theology, Theology of Liturgy, and Liturgical Reform,” in Liturgy and Tradition, ed. Thomas Fisch (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990) 40.
[ii] Alexander Schmemann, “Liturgical Theology, Theology of Liturgy, and Liturgical Reform,” in Fisch, 46-47.
[iii] Alexander Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 1974) 12.
[iv] Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2018) 15.
[v] Alexander Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit, 96
[vi] Alexander Schmemann, “Prayer, Liturgy, Renewal,” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review, 14, no 1, Spring 1969, 11.
[vii] Alexander Schmemann, “Theology and Eucharist," in Fisch, 79.
[viii] Alexander Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology (New York: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1975), 12.
Saint Vladimir’s President Very Rev. Dr. Chad Hatfield visited multiple Orthodox communities in the “land down under” this winter, teaching, speaking, and strengthening the Seminary’s relationships there.
Father Chad traveled to Australia in February for two weeks primarily to teach at St. Cyril’s Coptic Orthodox Theological Seminary in Sydney. He was invited by St. Cyril’s dean, Rev. Dr. Daniel Fanous, the author of the recently published SVS Press title A Silent Patriarch. Over the two weeks, Fr. Chad taught intensive seminars on missiology to thirty students from around the world including New Zealand and Zaire. He also spoke to a young adult group at St. Mark Coptic Orthodox Church, Sydney, and visited two other Coptic Churches in the area.
Fr. Chad then visited His Eminence Metropolitan Basilios at the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese Residency in Illawong. At the Archdiocese Residency, His Eminence and Fr. Chad discussed various Church matters, including the enhancement of relationships and future cooperation between the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese and St. Vladimir’s Seminary.
Finally, Fr. Chad traveled to St. Malkeh Syriac Orthodox Church just outside Sydney. The Syriac Orthodox community there is working on establishing a scholarship for the first Syriac Orthodox seminarian from Australia to attend St. Vladimir’s.
“What struck me the most about my time in Australia was the hunger for Orthodox teaching and resources and the love so many people have for the Seminary and SVS Press,” said Fr. Chad. “Orthodox bookstores there are filled with SVS Press books. I heard stories from people who were impacted by the visits of Seminary teachers dating all the way back to Fr. Thomas Hopko in the 1990s! It was also good to build on the good relationships forged there by Fr. John Behr in recent years.”
“Australia is hungry for Orthodoxy, and I think St. Vladimir’s can play an even stronger role in helping fill that need.”
In the short term, St. Vladimir’s is already working on making access to SVS Press books easier and more affordable in both Australia and New Zealand.
An Interview with Kimon Giannopoulos and John Varipatis
By Virginia Nieuwsma
In February of 2020, before the world knew that the COVID-19 tsunami was just around the corner, two members of the St. Stylianos parish in Sydney, Australia (Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia) met at a coffee house with Fr. Chad Hatfield. Father Chad was on a tour of the “land down under” teaching, speaking, and strengthening the Seminary’s relationships there. At the coffee house, the two men began discussing with Fr. Chad their plans to start the Orthodox Café + Bookstore. As students of St. Andrew’s Greek Orthodox Theological College, they had been inspired by Fr. Chad’s class on missiology, which they undertook not long before at St. Cyril’s Coptic Orthodox Theological Seminary. The two wanted to get his perspective on their ideas. Ten months later, even with the challenges of 2020, Kimon Giannopoulos and John Varipatis managed to get their venture off the ground despite their family commitments and busy professional careers. In a Zoom interview, they told us how—and what’s ahead.
John Varipatis, Katie Giannopoulos, Eva Giannopoulos, Dean Giannopoulos, Kimon Giannopoulos, and Vasilia Varipatis
Tell us about the Orthodox Café—its origins and its unique ministry.
Kimon
The Café is basically a great excuse for fellowship; Fr. Chad would attest to this, that one of the ministry challenges our clergy and clergy-to-be are facing is, how do you get young adults in the secular world to understand Orthodox spirituality and what it has to offer? Even the most embedded people like John, the son of a priest, tend to lose touch with the Church when they are in their late teens and twenties.
We’ve reviewed the census data, and since 1970 there has been a 30 percent drop in Christianity in Australia, with the biggest drop occurring in the 18–35-year-old age range. We’re losing people in this period of their lives; instead, they are going after yoga, Buddhism, self-reflection, “mindfulness training,” or other spiritual paths that might mimic some aspects of our Faith but aren’t the real answer. We’ve been missing the opportunity to bring Orthodoxy into the world. We realized that unless we began to get out there and talk about the reduction of young adults in the Church, we would lose this generation. And we didn’t want to use the word “fellowship,” which to us meant, “a group of people you have to hang out with.” What was needed was an outreach post, a gathering place, a comfortable community.
So, one day after class with Fr. Chad in February, we approached him and our first question was, “Do you drink coffee?” “Absolutely!” he said, so off we went down the street to the local coffee shop, where we told him over our chosen drinks, “Fr. Chad, we’ve got this idea. See how quickly you wanted to go for a walk and talk about theology over coffee?” We told him we felt there was an opportunity here, because the first thing you do in Australia when you want to catch up on a personal issue or meet with friends is you ask, “Are you free to grab a coffee?” We told him we wanted to create a community that was broad enough to be pan-Orthodox, because even though we are Greek Orthodox, our vision was to have any type of Orthodox Christian as well as inquirers join us.
We obtained our local bishop’s blessing, His Grace Bishop Emilianos of Meloa, and our priest’s support to use our large parish hall as our Orthodox Café space. People donated a refurbished coffee machine and about 10,000 coffee cups with our Café brand printed on them, so we managed to kick off the venture pretty much for free. At some point we began to sell our coffee beans and put together a supply chain where we can sell them at a competitive price in Australia. A lot of people ask, “Can we buy your beans?” without realizing that they are participating in an Orthodox mission outreach.
Of course, we started all this up around the time COVID arrived! John and I decided to embark on this mission plan because we felt that we weren’t busy enough [laughter]. We didn’t sleep in the best of times, and then when we began this ministry our wives were asking, “Are you sure you’ve got time for this additional work?” and we said, “Oh, we’ll fit it in, we don’t need sleep!”
John
One of the most amazing things we saw was that people in Orthodox communities want to help the Church. We just went to our parish priest with this idea and we didn’t have anything other than a nice church hall. I was bringing my old coffee machine from home when we first started the Café. Parishioners were more than happy to give to this, recognizing that there was a gap here in the Church that we haven’t been addressing, and that there is this young adult population that we’re just starting to capture now with the Café. We’ve been able to generate revenue by selling our coffee beans and selling books, so we’re making enough to stand on our own two feet.
Coffee is merely an excuse to get people to come together. The crux of the Café is the book side of things, the conversation side of things, with discussion where we can all learn about each other and discuss our spiritual questions; then we can help each other through the books and open discussion. It’s very humanizing and provides us a way to invite young adults into the Church. Our archbishop in Australia, His Eminence Archbishop Makarios, has said that “I have a dream for this Church, that the people who are outside, to be inside and that the people who are inside to open their hearts to those outside,” and this resonates strongly with us and is one of our goals for the Café.
How did St Vladimir’s enter into this picture?
Kimon
Back in June of 2019 I flew to New York for a meeting with investors for my work. Along with the sub-dean, Dr. Philip Kariatlis, from our Seminary, St Andrew’s Theological College, I was able to take the train from Grand Central up to the Crestwood station and visit the campus. I was just amazed at the atmosphere at St. Vladimir’s. I thought, “If this isn’t heaven on earth, I don’t know what is!” While we were touring the chapel, Fr. Chad stepped out of the side of the iconostasis and warmly welcomed us, even though he was preparing for the service to start. Then we were able to worship in Three Hierarchs Chapel, experiencing the beautiful liturgy in four-part harmony—it was amazing.
Father Chad also took us around for a tour of the whole campus; library, gym, bookshop, seminary housing. I felt such a connection with St. Vladimir’s even with the thousands of kilometers of sea we have between us.
At some point Fr. Chad mentioned that he was coming to Australia in February and doing a missiology class. I said, “Missiology? What’s that?” and he said, “That thing that Christ said—the Great Commission!” On the train back to Grand Central after our visit I said to Philip, “This is how I can add value to the Church, through mission work! With my experience in the corporate world, there has got to be a way for me to apply my skills to help bring people closer to Christ.” And that was the germ for the Café idea, which then came into sharper focus in Fr. Chad’s missiology class the following February.
Fast forward to our after-class coffee with Fr. Chad. He told John and I, “The key challenge you guys will have to face in doing this is that you will be taking a risk.” This was really the message of his entire course: mission requires people to take risks for Christ and His Church. We have found this to be true: John and I have been taking lots of risk since that coffee with Fr. Chad but his course helped us prepare for that.
How did the Press become a part of your mission plan?
Kimon
John and I were influenced by a quote we read, that books have become marginalized and treated as something we only put on our shelves. We decided that we wanted to see books opened and discussed, and in so doing, we would be able to explore the message of the gospel through the eyes of different authors. Of course, the preeminent books are the four Gospels but then our Orthodox fathers, mothers, and saints have so much to teach us. When we drew people to the Café we knew we needed to have solid content and writing that would hold their attention.
Thanks to the team at SVS Press, we are going to receive a whole “small bookstore” that we can make available through the Café to kick off our store. We get weekly texts from members of the Café asking, “Can you get me this book?” “I’m interested in the spiritual life; can you point me in the right direction?” We show videos too; instead of reading the book first and then watching a video, this generation tends to want to see the video first and then buy the book! We keep our agenda fresh with books, videos, activities, and speakers; right now, we’re writing Christmas cards for the elderly. We’ve also sponsored an Orthodox film festival, Byzanfest, and played many of these Orthodox films at the Café during November. But our end goal is always to bring these young adults into the experience of the Divine Liturgy; that’s success for us.
John
At the beginning, we started with what we had, with the books that were at our disposal and the location we had at our disposal. We were blown away by how many young adults joined the conversation and by the depth of the conversations we were having. Not everyone bought a book on the first day of the Café, but as people started returning, they told us what they were interested in, and we were able to recommend books and explain how those titles could be relevant to them and help answer their questions. Everything came to fruition with our willingness to start using the small infrastructure at our disposal.
Where do you hope to go from here?
John
We are talking to other parishes and looking to open another Café that’s centrally located in the heart of Sydney. We’re also looking at a possibility to bring a Café to the other side of Australia in Perth, so we’re in conversation with a parish priest there. We hope to share our ideas and our template for this start up to let as many people use it as possible. A bookstore/coffee shop is a place where conversions happen and where people can learn about the Faith. Why limit it just to the southern part of Sydney? Franchise, that’s the goal. We’ll be competing with Starbucks! Anyway, everyone in America says that Australian coffee is so good!
Kimon
We want to get other parishes on board and take the complexity out of setup: books, coffee beans, logistics. The thing they need to do is follow the model and methodology.
Something we learned early on is that missions need the blessing of the bishop. When you take these risks, you have to do them with your parish priest’s and bishop’s blessings. We also got great support from our archbishop—in fact, the meeting started with, “Do you guys want an espresso?” He was so loving and heartfelt in his empathy for the young adult community. He even shared his dream that we would have a central café right in the Archdiocese headquarters overlooking the beautiful Prince Alfred Park in Sydney. We also have the idea of partnering with aged care facilities, joint ventures so to speak, to connect the elderly with the youth.
Our brains never stop thinking about ideas!
Is Fr. Chad still involved with this effort?
John
Throughout the project, we have been talking with Fr. Chad quite frequently. He has pointed us in the right direction and linked us with the right people. At some point in our regular meetings with him he introduced us to Sarah Werner at SVS Press, and she has given us a great rate for our books and been very helpful.
Kimon
Without having had the connection with Fr. Chad, taking his course, having that experience for two weeks with him (the mission plan we wrote was actually an assignment for his class!), having his help to strategize, then making the connections with other people like Sarah Werner through him—I’m certain that without St. Vladimir’s Seminary and Fr. Chad, this would not have happened, it’s as simple as that.
John Varipatis has been married for two years to Vasilia; they both have called Sydney, Australia home for their entire lives. John's parents, Fr. Constantine and Presvytera Eleni, have three children; John and his twin brother George have an older sister, Presvytera Stamatia. John is currently studying for a Bachelor of Theology at St. Andrew's Orthodox Theological College in Sydney, under the hierarchical oversight of Archbishop Makarios. Prior to studying at St Andrew's, John completed a Bachelor of Commerce degree at the University of Wollongong, and a Diploma in Project Management at Petersham TAFE. This training opened the door for him to work professionally as a Project Manager at Kaplan. As Kimon mentioned, he and John are not only brothers in Christ, but they now share a deeper spiritual bond since John and Vasilia are Godparents to Kimon and Katie's daughter Eva.
Kimon Giannopoulos is a husband and father, blessed to be married to Ekaterina (Katie) for seven years, and through the grace of God blessed to be a father to children Konstantinos (“Dean”, age 3) and Evangelia (“Eva”, 10 months old). Kimon and Katie both grew up in Sydney, Australia; both of their grandparents migrated to the antipodes (Australia) after World War II. Both Kimon's maternal great-grandfathers were Greek Orthodox priests from Northern Greece, and thus the Orthodox Church was a central part of his upbringing. He is a master's student in theology at St. Andrew's Theological College in Sydney, under the hierarchical oversight of Archbishop Makarios, and is completing his postgraduate studies in 2021. Having acquired a zeal to learn more about the Orthodox faith, Kimon prayerfully hopes to continue beyond next year with ongoing theological study and higher research. Kimon's undergraduate degrees were in commerce, majoring in accounting and finance, and he is a chartered accountant. He currently works at Qantas, Australia's national airline carrier as the chief financial officer of Qantas Loyalty, where he has been an employee for over ten years.
The twelve-acre campus of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary (SVOTS) is as beautiful as ever following a weekend clean-up by seminarians and family members.
Seminarian Alisha Solheim, one of the student leaders of SVOTS’ St. Herman Society for Orthodox Ecology, helped lead the spring clean-up effort Saturday, March 27, 2021.
The Seminary community is grateful to Alisha, the St. Herman Society, and all who participated!
The new website of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary (SVOTS) has gone live with a fresh new look and loads of new, helpful features.
“The fresh and simplified design of the website will provide a welcoming and smooth experience for visitors hoping to learn about Seminary and experience great content—information, resources, news articles, videos, podcasts, blogs, and more,” said Sarah Werner, chief marketing officer for St. Vladimir’s Seminary. “We are grateful to the team at Promet Source, who helped us build the new website, and to everyone on the Seminary team who poured hours of work into the project.”
Among other new features, the new site allows visitors to tailor their experience using the “I am a…” option at the top of the homepage. Prospective students, current students, donors, and alumni are able to navigate directly to sections of the website designed specifically for them.
About St Vladimir’s Seminary Saint Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, located on a beautiful twelve-acre campus in Yonkers, NY, serves our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ by bearing witness to Him throughout the world. The Seminary is accredited through the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) and trains priests, lay leaders, and scholars to be active apologists of the Orthodox Christian Faith—focusing on academic rigor and spiritual formation within a residential Orthodox community.
