The Defender of the Orthodoxy or the Pious Catholic? St. Sophia of Slutsk in the Narratives of 19th – early 20th Centuries

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the history of the perception of St. Sophia of Slutsk by both Russian-language (Athanasius Vechorko, Gregory Kulzhinski, Feodor Sero-Solovievitch etc.) and Polish-language (Jozeph Krashevski, Josephine Osipovska, Vladislav Syrokomla, Teodor Korvin-Shimanovski) writers of the 19th – early 20th centuries. St. Sophia is canonized by the Orthodox Church. Despite that, in the early 21st century Belarusian historians debated her denomination. This article claims that the dispute related to the Saint’s denomination is based on two competing points of view which formed in the 19th century, although, at that time their proponents did not debate. Two traditions of perception of Sophia are distinguished. According to the first of these, Sophia was the defender of the Orthodoxy from the Catholics. Based on the second one, she was the Catholic of Roman or Greek rite who could hardly be related to the Orthodoxy. The link between the development of the Orthodox cult of Sophia at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries and the elaboration of the concept «Slutsk – the stronghold of the persecuted Orthodoxy in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth» is investigated.