Month: September 2012

Feast of the Maccabees/Feast of Honey-Blessing.  Макаўе-Мядовы Спас. Father Aljaksandr blesses water by dipping his cross into the full barrels.  He makes certain that drops from the cross fall not onto the floor but into the vessel used for sprinkling Holy Water on parishioners and the flowers and honey they have brought to church.  After… Continue reading Photo of the Day for September 20, 2012

Feast of the Maccabees/Feast of Honey-Blessing.  Макаўе-Мядовы Спас. The feast of the Maccabees/feast of honey-blessing is the first harvest-related feast in the Orthodox calendar.  Here parishioners lay out  water, flowers, honey and even poppy seeds (left-center of second photo) for the priest to bless. Azdamichy 2012.  Аздамічы 2012 год.

Makauje (Feast of the Maccabees/Feast of Honey-Blessing).  Макаўе-Мядовы Спас. Three mid-August church feasts in Belarus vivify pre-Christian traditions absorbed into our Christian faith. The August 14 Orthodox Feast of the Maccabees/Feast of Honey-Blessing, which inaugurates the two-week Orthodox Dormition fast, is the first of these.  The Orthodox church tries to focus attention on a churchly… Continue reading Photo of the Day for September 18, 2012

Grave of Paweł Pałczynski, Hlybokaje 2012.  Помнік Паўлу Паўчынскаму, Глыбокае 2012 год. Under the 1921 Polish-Soviet Treaty of Riga, the Soviets held on to the eastern two-thirds of today’s Belarus, lands which the Bolsheviks had occupied in 1919.  The western third of Belarus was incorporated into the Second Polish Republic.  On September 1, 1939 Nazi… Continue reading Photo of the Day for September 17, 2012

Shypilavichy 2012.  Шыпілавічы 2012 год. Shypilavichy is one of a series of photogenic villages on the quiet secondary road to Polesia that I always prefer to the dull, crowded main north-south highway.  No matter the season, something always makes me pause to enjoy the carefully-tended private plots of its residents (e.g., see photo for October… Continue reading Photo of the Day for September 16, 2012

Kryvoje Sjalo 2012.  Крывое Сяло 2012. This is a bumper year for apples in Belarus.  It was difficult to resist the temptation to stop the car, sit on this bench, pick an apple from the heavy-laden overhanging branch, and watch the world go by.  

Evening sky near Kljepachy, August 2012.  Жнівеньскае неба ўвечару, ля Клепачаў 2012 год.

Evangelical baptism, Vjalikaje Maljeshava 2012.  Эвангеліцкае хрышчэньне, Вялікае Малешава 2012 год.  Гл. таксама фотаздымкі 21-22 і 24-25 ліпеня 2010 года. Polesian immigrants to the United States took evangelical Christianity back with them when they returned to central Polesia in the first decade and a half of the 20th century.   Repressed along with the Roman… Continue reading Photo of the Day for September 13, 2012

Monument-chapel to fallen insurgents in the Uprising of 1863, near the village of Milavidy.  Two thousand thirteen marks the sesquicentennial of the Uprising of 1863-64 against the occupying Russian Empire.  This campaign was a heroic but tragic struggle for national independence and the restoration in its pre-1772 borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had been… Continue reading Photo of the Day for September 12, 2012

Kryvoje Sjalo 2012.  Крывое Сяло 2012. While photographing the houses and gardens in this tidy, apple-tree-filled village, I came across these three ladies enjoying a Sunday-afternoon chat.  Reassured that I was not some kind of inspector, they kindly accepted my invitation to take their portraits.