The Homer church is defined on their website as: “an Old Rite Church under the spiritual care of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR). This community church embraces the ancient liturgical practices and customs of the Old Rite. Our services are conducted in English, ensuring that the beauty and depth of the Orthodox tradition are accessible to all who join us….” Vasily Yakunin said there are approximately 25-40 attendees in service at the church currently. Two guests joining the church for the holiday are Father Piman from Erie, Pennsylvania and Father Steven from Missouri. The Fathers were interested in presenting some history on the religion to the community of Homer and will provide a presentation at the Kachemak Bay Campus on Friday August 15th. The title of the presentation is Orthodox Christianity and is described as “two men, a former Old Believer and a former Protestant share their paths to Orthodox Christianity.”
Yakunin, a life long resident of the Kenai Peninsula, once in Nikolaevsk and now in Homer is helping coordinate events with the church for “Feast Day” that he says will take place on the 19th of August. This day includes a religious two week fasting period from August 14 until 28th and the fast will be broken with dinner of fish, he explained.
Yakunin briefly described some of the trajectories that created transitions in the Russian Old Believer communities in the United States.
“So, in the Schism of 1666, in Russia, there was a split between the Old Believers and the New Right. And so, The Old Believers, that is the traditional word that you see in Homer, Alaska, they were a far more pomorian priestless were a far more organized priestless group than, for instance, our people, which are the group “czes” I don't know if it derives from the ours, but I'm not sure. Anyways, they moved into Pennsylvania in the 1890’s, I think.”
This was the period of time when Father Piman, now approximately age 80, moved to Pennsylvania with his family, according to Yakunin. Piman provided an interview with the Eastern American Diocese Website in 2018 and the full transcript is available on that website (https://eadiocese.org).
Many of the Old Believers who came to America settled in Erie, where they could find work in paper mills, docks, mines and steel mills in the surrounding cities in Pennsylvania. The first Old Believer church in the region was built in 1919.
In the early years, Old Believer traditions remained intact and the members of the community preserved the Russian language. After the Second World War, there was an "Americanization" of the parish. Piman explained that the men began to shave their traditional beards, the women cut their hair and eventually stopped wearing the traditional dresses while children began to speak mainly English.
Finally he was quoted as saying that, "during the Great Depression, many Old Believers went to Detroit, where they hoped to find work…In the early 1960s, the Tolstoy Fund found money and ‘extracted’ Old Believers from Turkey to the U.S. who had gone there from China, which was becoming communist. The largest group of Old Believers settled in New Jersey, but many considered these places too Americanized and moved to Oregon, and then to Alaska, where they founded their own city, Nikolaevsk, in 1968.
Nikolaevsk is located approximately 15 miles north of Homer and can be reached from the North Fork Road on the Sterling Highway. The public school in Nikolaevsk, once relatively large in size, has recently closed due to declines in population as the Russian Old Believer communities settled in other small communities to the east of Homer.
In addition to the opportunity to share two religious speakers with the community of Homer Yakunin shared why this particular holiday, Feast Day, is important for the church in Homer:
“So the Feast Day is when our church is dedicated in honor of the Transfiguration. When you build the church, you dedicate it to, to to a certain day. And that's kind of like the name of the church. And so the church, in essence, goes through the same, the same things as a human does. When they become orthodox. They have to be baptized. They get a name, they get Chris, made it everything the same thing, and the church goes through the same process. And so the church is, it's not, doesn't get, like a human name. It gets, you know, like Hagia Sophia, or which is divine wisdom.”
The KPC presentation will be offered Friday evening at 6 p.m.
Reporting from Homer, this is Emilie Springer
