Windows on the history of icons and ecclesiastical objects (dissertation)
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Windows on the history of icons and ecclesiastical objects. The Cultural Heritage of Artefacts of the Finnish Orthodox Church from the 1920s to the 1980s.
Public examination of a doctoral dissertation in the field of art history
Doctoral candidate: Katariina Husso
Date and venue: 30.9.2011, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä
During the Second World War, military conflicts between Finland and the Soviet Union took place in two phases: The “Winter War” took place in 1939-40. Hostilities continued from June 1941 to November 1944, the period known as the “Continuation War”. Rescue operations carried out during the wars concerned firstly population, but included also the evacuation of property. The Soviet offensive came as a surprise to the Orthodox parishes of Karelia, the majority of which were located in a war zone. In fact, no specific plans had been made for the evacuation of the congregations’ property, and the priests of the Karelian churches tried to save ecclesiastical objects and parish archives in great haste and with the help of soldiers. Archives were packed into boxes, liturgical objects and books gathered into potato sacks, and icons were cut into parts to make them easier to load and transport. Gold-embroidered church textiles were used as packing material.
The rebuilding of the displaced Finnish Orthodox congregations took place in 1950-60, when, with the financial help of the state, 13 churches and 42 chapels were built throughout Finland. Rescued icons, liturgical objects and textiles were used to decorate these new places of worship. Archdeacon Leo Kasanko (1906-1973), secretary of Archbishop Herman, the head of the Finnish Orthodox Church, was responsible for most of the interior design of these churches and chapels. He compiled an inventory of all the saved liturgical paraphernalia and a distribution plan, according to which new sanctuaries were furnished.
Kasanko operated on a statutory basis. The law (26/50) and statute (214/50) of the reconstruction of the Finnish Orthodox Church stipulated that all ecclesiastical objects that had been evacuated from parishes of the lost Karelia and Petchenga had to be relocated for congregational use in new places of worship around Finland. Quite soon it became obvious that there were not enough old icons and liturgical equipment to satisfy the needs of the parishes. This is why approximately 350 new icons were painted and other kinds of ecclesiastical objects were made for reconstruction purposes. Also a great number of liturgical items were given by Valaam Monastery to meet the congregations’ needs.
The inventorying, selection and transfer of valuable ecclesiastical property brought to Leo Kasanko’s mind the idea of a museum which would display icons, liturgical objects and textiles and in general illustrate the history of Orthodoxy in Finland. While he sorted out the evacuated objects to be distributed to parishes, he also set aside objects which possessed great art-historical and antiquarian value. Already in 1952 he and Father Aari Surakka suggested to the Orthodox Church Council, the governing body of the Finnish Orthodox Church, that these objects should not be distributed to parishes but be saved for future museological purposes. Kasanko’s vision became a reality when the Orthodox Church Museum was founded in 1957. The 1952 collection formed its basis. On the eve of opening, the museum received a significant collection of church textiles, sacred objects and icons from the Konevets Monastery, which was disestablished in 1956. In addition, a considerable number of holy objects was taken from Valaam Monastery to the museum during next decades. At first the Orthodox Church Museum was located in the basement of Kuopio’s parish church. It moved to its present location in 1969, when a new central building for the Finnish Orthodox Church was compleated.
The roots of the Finnish national cultural heritage of ecclesiastical artefacts lie in the events that took place in 1920s. It was the time when the (autonomous) Finnish Orthodox Church was founded. The era also witnessed the construction of a Finnish speaking national Church. The jurisdictional tie between the Finnish Church and the oppressed Church in Bolshevik Russia was broken, and Archishop Seraphim, a Russian, was replaced by Herman Aav, who was Estonian. The use of Church Slavonic was frequently, though not always, replaced by Finnish. In addition, church architecture, icons and church textiles were moulded in a more nationalistic fashion. The depository of ecclesiastical items was also founded in the 1920s, when a significant number of liturgical objects from Russian military churches was given to the Orthodox Church of Finland by the state.
The idea of an ecclesiastical museum was not a completely new one in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Valamo Collection of Ancient Objects had already been founded in 1911. Its foundation was a consequence of the awakening of historical awareness in the Russian Orthodox Church, of which Finland’s Orthodox diocese was part at that time. The Valaam collection was planned to be a diocesan museum, but its collections consisted mostly of objects belonging to the Monastery. Although the museum existed until the Winter War evacuations, its development ceased on account of nationalist tensions in the latter half of 1920s. The institution was seen as a relic of the Tsarist regime and Russian Orthodoxy, which were both negative factors in the eyes of Finnish nationalists.
The Second World War in many ways brought about a new direction in the development of the production of national Orthodox culture. Nevertheless, nationalist discourse continued during the reconstruction. Russian history and cultural influence were dispelled in many ways. For example, until 1953, the official name of the Finnish Orthodox Church was the “Greek-Catholic Church of Finland”. The official explanation for such a shift was the confusion which the term was said to cause, but one can also interpret the switch as an attempt to revise and re-define collective identity. The tools for this were a new discourse and vocabulary. The word ”Orthodox” is derived from Greek, not Russian, and it evoked the authority and splendour of Byzantium.
In addition, modernistic ideas and influences had begun to make themselves felt amongst Orthodox Finns. A small group of intellectuals discovered current trends in the 1950s and began to apply those ideas to the Finnish context. Modernistic discourse was more widely adopted during the 1960s, when revivalist icon painting and its ideological subtext gained more ground. Quite soon, all ecclesiastical art, including the old, evacuated heritage as well as new icons were evaluated and appreciated according to modernist criteria. Firstly, this widened the meaning of icons from the liturgical context into artistic and museological contexts. Icons were no longer only cultic objects but were evaluated on the basis of the canon of art history and cultural history. Secondly, the ideal of church art was taken from the distant past and the canon of the Orthodox art was laid down according to it. The art of ancient Byzantium and mediaeval Russia were indisputable examples of Orthodox art and the goal in general was a “return to tradition”. This revivalist endeavour for “originality” and “purity” corresponds in general terms to the modernistic ideal. In addition, an academic interest in icons and their history as art arose simultaneously as the new, revivalist icon painting.
Theological argumentation was essential in the revivalist discourse, and from a revivalistic point of view the question of ecclesiastical art was totally theological. Nevertheless, the discourse reveals the use of modernistic and art historical language. For example, the question of style emerged. As already mentioned, during the 1950s, and especially from the 1960s onwards, this revivalist ideology led to the re-evaluation of the cultural heritage of the Finnish Orthodox Church. In the light of the canon of modernist art, the rescued icons were more often than not seen as stylistically “decadent” and their artistic and theological value despised. Needless to say, this change of attitudes did not take place among the older Russian monks of Valaam and Konevets or among the majority of Karelian refugees. In revivalist evaluation the so-called icons of the period of reconstruction which were painted in the1950s and 1960s were also rejected. They were accused of iconographical faults and stylistic frailty.
The Orthodox Church Museum was an offspring of this reconstruction, but also a manifestation of the national Orthodox Church, which presented a refined image of Eastern Christianity and its rich material culture. This was done by displaying a priceless collection of icons, sacred objects and textiles which were said to be too precious for congregational use. Inside the Church, however, the opinions about the Museum’s role and function varied. Some disapproved pf exhibiting icons while many places of worship essentially had no holy images to place on their empty walls. Some considered the Museum merely as a depository and an equivalent for old rizniza, for the storage of liturgical objects and textiles. Problems naturally emerged between museum ethics and established ecclesiastical practice. Later on museological practices were put in place, but in the eyes of several congregations the Museum was seen chiefly as a depository for unwanted and displaced ecclesiastical artefacts.
As far one can judge, the above-mentioned changes were linked with the process through which the Orthodox Church of Finland became assimilated into the country’s non-Orthodox, secularized post-war society. The Finnish Orthodox Church wanted to clarify its identity as a non-Russian Church. The Russian aspect in Finnish cultural heritage was fading away and was displaced by a discourse that emphasized the distant Byzantine ancestry of Orthodox religion and culture. The ideological attempt to ”return to tradition” was interlinked with the project of national Orthodox church art. The outcome was twofold, mirroring the cultural practice of the Church. In art historical and cultural terms, the recovered heritage was seen as a material database of heterogenous art, history and culture. In theological terms, inspired by revivalism, the old artistic heritage was above all a historical burden.
This ideological change imposed a peculiar situation: until the 1980s, the old, artistic heritage of Orthodox Finns was in a state of ambivalence. On the one hand it was appreciated and cherished by older parishioners and some museum experts, but on the other hand it was seen more or less worthless in the eyes of revivalistic thinkers. This situation led to action, and the last decades of the 20th century witnessed massive modifications of churches from the reconstruction period. The old holy images as well as the icons of the reconstruction period were sent to the Orthodox Church Museum, and interiors were reconstructed according to modernist taste. These events reveal not only a shift in attitudes, but also the lack of a clearly delineated cultural policy in the Finnish Orthodox Church.
(-> In Finnish)