The Orthodox Church at the Edge of Europe

On Sunday, my wife and I left Warsaw bright and early and headed along Route 637 to the Belarusian border. We passed the large military zone just east of Warsaw, where in days gone by the Czarist army and later the Red Army could park itself in case of potential unrest. The 637 is the old road, built by the Czar, upgraded by the Soviets post-1945, allowing rapid deployment of Russian forces from the border into Warsaw. Just eight years ago, the road surface was still in relatively good condition; today, it's deteriorated, and traffic along the road, passing through towns like Wegrow and Sokolow Podlaski, does not warrant the big zloties needed to keep it maintained to armoured fighting vehicle standard.

Traffic used to be light, with many stolen cars from the west heading for a porous border before making their way to the used car markets further east. The border's slammed shut on that enterprise today; the few cars with foreign number plates are clearly tourists. Sokolow has become a prosperous town thanks to its meat processing factory and other recent investments. Beyond Sokolow, what little traffic there was falls away.

Next we cross the River Bug, marking the September 1939 - June 1941 border between the Third Reich and the USSR. Signs of Soviet occupation of the far side of the River Bug remain in the form of numerous concrete bunkers, there to keep Stalin's erstwhile allies at bay. On to Drohiczyn, a small town of three Baroque churches, sandy beaches on the shores of the Bug, and an underdeveloped tourist presence for such a picturesque location. Here, one can take a riverboat trip on a Soviet-built craft reminscent of the boat in 'Apocalypse Now', only painted grey. Price 7PLN (less than two bucks/euros, just over a pound) for around 30 minutes.

As one heads east, so the villages take on a different character, with more wooden buildings in various states of decay, some, though gaily painted and well-maintained despite their antiquity. Here, in villages such as Slochy Annopolskie, one can hear Belarusian spoken in the streets by old folk, sitting on benches outside the houses, erected there so the dwellers could sit and chat with passers-by.

Crossing the main north-south Bialystok-Lublin road, the countryside acquires a borderlands character. Some five km east of the crossroads, you pass under the railway line from Hajnowka in the Bielowieza forest (home of the European bison) to Warsaw. We're now less than 20km from the border. Forests line both sides of the road. Three more villages lie along the way, the last of which, Adamowo, is a pumping and gas storage terminal for the pipeline that runs from the Siberian oilfields through Belarusia and Poland on to western Europe. Adamowo also houses a sizeable garrison of border defence troops. One final crossroads, beyond which is a 'No entry except for local traffic' sign; we're now two kilometers from Europe's eastern frontier.

There's a reason for going on; the Orthodox church at Tokary, a village arbitralily divided after 1945 by the Polish-Soviet (today Polish-Belarusian) border. The wooden church, painted bright pale blue, was built in 1912 . Sited among trees, a little way off the road which ends at a red-and-white barrier and a sign saying 'National Border', the church is surrounded by old, large wooden Orthodox crosses with ribbons tied to the them.

I asked a man if the service had started. It was 11:05 am; "Is this the eleven o'clock service?" I asked. "No, the nine o'clock". We went inside; a splendid iconstasis, women on the left, men on the right, average age, 70; angelic singing in harmony that makes Catholic church song seem banal and crude in comparison. The hymn lasted maybe 10-15 minutes, repeating the same four-line verse-chorus many many times.

Bicycles in the churchyard had cyrillic names, presumably relics from the times before Lukashenka tightened the screws and Poland joined the EU, when local villagers could freely cross the border. Older people spoke Belarusian. The Pop (Orthodox priest) looked young; in his mid-20s, beardless, but with a black pony-tail and floor-length clerical robe.

The service over, people visited the miraculous well outside the church for some healing water before heading off home.

A beautiful visit to a different age; pity that half of the congregation consisted of tourists... [like us...]