Hands Across the Ocean

Over the past couple of years a connection has been formed between the Monastery of St John in Manton, CA and Orthodox Christians living in the Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia, as well as some expatriate Gagauz people living in Russia.

You might wonder who the Gagauz are. Here we have something fascinating. They are a Turkic people who have been Orthodox Christian since late Byzantine times. This combination of ethnicity, language, and religious tradition gives their culture something unique. Usually we think of Turkic peoples as having become Muslim, and this is true of a great many nations, but there are also Buddhists among some of the Turkic groups and also those who hold onto the more ancient animist and shamanist practices. Scattered subgroups of Orthodox Christians exist within the Turkic peoples, whose homelands stretch from East and Central Asia to Eastern Europe and from the Arctic regions to the Mediterranean, but what distinguishes the Gagauz is the antiquity and deep-rootedness of their Orthodoxy. Because they have migrated from place to place over the centuries before settling down where they are now, three main geographic elements can be seen in their culture: remnants of the ancient Turkic nomadic life, a Balkan influence, and a Bessarabian part.

For example, on the 6^th of May the Gagauz celebrate a festival called Hederlez, which they share with many of the peoples of the Balkans and which crosses religious lines. It is a spring festival in honor of a mythical meeting between St George and the Prophet Elijah. On the 8^th of November the Gagauz celebrate St Dimitri. On these two feasts of Hederlez and St Dimitri’s Day a lamb is slaughtered and roasted. The two festivals divide the year into two equal parts, which are connected with the old style of life when the ancestors of the Gagauz were still nomadic sheepherders in Central Asia. Hederlez marks the beginning of summer, when the flocks are taken out from the villages to pasture and people make the special mud out of a mixture of sand and clay which they use to repair the roofs of their houses. On St Dimitri’s day the flocks are brought back and the shepherds are paid for their work.

The time from Christmas to New Year, is also a special period of celebration for the Gagauz. Children go from house to house singing songs and shouting “Hey! Hey!” — which means exactly the same thing in Gagauz as it does in English, a shout of rejoicing. During this time prayers are said for health and prosperity of the community.

The Christian element entered Gagauz culture during Byzantine times. At that point they lived on the western edge of the empire. That was when they came into the Orthodox Church, probably in the thirteenth century. At that point they were under the Ecumenical Patriarchate and absorbed Orthodox Christianity in its Greek form. If you look at prayer books and translations of Psalms in the Gagauz language, you will be struck by the number of Greek words that were adopted into their vocabulary for church, spirituality, and liturgical practice. Whereas most Turkic languages borrowed words for these parts of their vocabulary from Arabic, with an Islamic tinge, in Gagauz you can still see evidence of their contact with the Byzantines from almost a millennium ago. More recent borrowings of religious vocabulary have come into the language from Russian and Bulgarian.

In more recent times, toward the end of the nineteenth century, they moved from Bulgaria to Bessarabia, which is in the southern part of present-day Moldova. Villages of Gagauz can also be found in the Ukraine and in some parts of northern Greece. They now belong to the Moscow Patriarchate.

The other side of their unique culture is their Turkishness, which can be seen in their cuisine and many of their customs. Some of their favorite foods are made just the same way as when their ancestors herded their flocks in the vast plains of Central Asia. And one is struck over and over by references to the wolf as an animal the Gagauz people are fond of, an animal which plays an important role in old legends that date back to the nomadic days when it was the totem of the clan that slowly made its way westward.

The Gagauz are a small group of people, and the number who speak Gagauz is small, perhaps half a million people at most. Their language, part of the western branch of the Turkic languages and quite similar to the Turkish spoken by people in Turkey, has been influenced over the centuries by Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Russian. It is considered “endangered” and is listed as such by UNESCO. They live in an area dominated by Russian culture, and many of them are bilingual in Gagauz and Russian. A frequent occurrence is for a Gagauz person to marry a Russian, and then the husband and wife speak only Russian at home, so that their children grow up without hearing their ancestral language except, perhaps, from their grandparents. This is the chief mechanism whereby the number of native speakers has diminished quickly over the last few generations.

Another factor that endangers the language is that it is used primarily at home and among close friends but not in public. For example, the Orthodox Church liturgy and other services are typically in Slavonic. There are efforts underway now, however, to get a blessing from the hierarchs of the Moscow Patriarchate to allow the use of Gagauz in church services. One very good sign of favor is the recent visit of Patriarch Kirill to Gagauzia. The bishop of the area has also encouraged the translation of scripture and other texts into Gagauz.