Вестник Свято-Филаретовского института (Aug 2018)
Brotherhood at Parish or Parish at Brotherhood? On the History of the Russian-Estonian Orthodox Brotherhood Named after the Holy Hieromartyr Isidore of Yuriev in Saint Petersburg
Abstract
The Brotherhood named after the holy hieromartyr Isidore of Yuriev was established in 1898 in Saint Petersburg at the Estonian parish, immediately after the final canonization of the saint. The new brotherhood became a kind of “cast” of the Orthodox Baltic Brotherhood, founded by M. Galkin-Vrasky, although the latter’s objectives were markedly different. The immediate goal of creating the brotherhood was to build an Estonian Orthodox church in the capital and to get church life for Orthodox Estonians on the right track. In a fairly short time, the parish house was built at the expense of the brotherhood, which organized various social activities by having opened a school, a hospitage, a workhouse, a printing house and a library with a reading room. However, due to the rigid connection with the parish, both structurally and organizationally, the brotherhood was to share its destiny. The active life of the brotherhood and the parish began to fade away in 1915 because of the new diocese-scale cares undertaken by Archpriest Paul Kulbush, the brotherhood’s organizer, builder and rector of St. Isidore church (the future hieromartyr Platon, Bishop of Revel). The year 1917 undermined even more significantly the activities of the brotherhood. At first, Kulbush’s departure to the Revel chair, then the outflow of former parishioners to Estonia, the economic crisis, the separation the school from the church forced to give up almost all social projects. By the beginning of 1918, the church nominally continued to be listed as the parish of the Estonian Orthodox brotherhood, but the brotherhood itself soon receded in memory.
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