Missionary
A missionary is a member of a religious group sent into an area to proselytize or perform ministries of service, such as education, social justice, health care, economic development. The word "mission" originates from 1598 when the Jesuits sent members abroad, derived from the Latin missionem, meaning "act of sending" or mittere, meaning "to send"; the word was used in light of its biblical usage. The term is most used for Christian missions, but can be used for any creed or ideology. A Christian missionary can be defined as "one, to witness across cultures"; the Lausanne Congress of 1974, defined the term, related to Christian mission as, "to form a viable indigenous church-planting movement". Missionaries can be found in many countries around the world. In the Bible, Jesus is recorded as instructing the apostles to make disciples of all nations; this verse is referred to by Christian missionaries as the Great Commission and inspires missionary work. The Christian Church expanded throughout the Roman Empire in New Testament times and is said by tradition to have reached further, to Persia and to India.
During the Middle Ages, the Christian monasteries and missionaries such as Saint Patrick, Adalbert of Prague propagated learning and religion beyond the European boundaries of the old Roman Empire. In 596, Pope Gregory the Great sent the Gregorian Mission into England. In their turn, Christians from Ireland and from Britain became prominent in converting the inhabitants of central Europe. During the Age of Discovery, the Catholic Church established a number of missions in the Americas and in other Western colonies through the Augustinians and Dominicans to spread Christianity in the New World and to convert the Native Americans and other indigenous people. About the same time, missionaries such as Francis Xavier as well as other Jesuits, Augustinians and Dominicans reached Asia and the Far East, the Portuguese sent missions into Africa. Emblematic in many respects is Matteo Ricci's Jesuit mission to China from 1582, peaceful and non-violent; these missionary movements should be distinguished from others, such as the Baltic Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries, which were arguably compromised in their motivation by designs of military conquest.
Much contemporary Catholic missionary work has undergone profound change since the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965, with an increased push for indigenization and inculturation, along with social justice issues as a constitutive part of preaching the Gospel. As the Catholic Church organizes itself along territorial lines and had the human and material resources, religious orders, some specializing in it, undertook most missionary work in the era after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. Over time, the Holy See established a normalized Church structure in the mission areas starting with special jurisdictions known as apostolic prefectures and apostolic vicariates. At a stage of development these foundations are raised to regular diocesan status with a local bishops appointed. On a global front, these processes were accelerated in the 1960s, in part accompanying political decolonization. In some regions, they are still in course. Just as the Bishop of Rome had jurisdiction in territories considered to be in the Eastern sphere, so the missionary efforts of the two 9th-century saints Cyril and Methodius were conducted in relation to the West rather than the East, though the field of activity was central Europe.
The Eastern Orthodox Church, under the Orthodox Church of Constantinople undertook vigorous missionary work under the Roman Empire and its successor the Byzantine Empire. This had lasting effects and in some sense is at the origin of the present relations of Constantinople with some sixteen Orthodox national churches including the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Georgian Orthodox and Apostolic Church, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church; the Byzantines expanded their missionary work in Ukraine after the mass baptism in Kiev in 988. The Serbian Orthodox Church had its origins in the conversion by Byzantine missionaries of the Serb tribes when they arrived in the Balkans in the 7th century. Orthodox missionaries worked among the Estonians from the 10th to the 12th centuries, founding the Estonian Orthodox Church. Under the Russian Empire of the 19th century, missionaries such as Nicholas Ilminsky moved into the subject lands and propagated Orthodoxy, including through Belarus, Moldova, Estonia and China.
The Russian St. Nicholas of Japan took Eastern Orthodoxy to Japan in the 19th century; the Russian Orthodox Church sent missionaries to Alaska beginning in the 18th century, including Saint Herman of Alaska, to minister to the Native Americans. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia continued missionary work outside Russia after the 1917 Russian Revolution, resulting in the establishment of many new dioceses in the diaspora, from which numerous converts have been made in Eastern Europe, North America, Oceania. Early Protestant missionaries included John Eliot and contemporary ministers
Christianization
Christianization is the conversion of individuals to Christianity or the conversion of entire groups at once. Various strategies and techniques were employed in Christianization campaigns from Late Antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages; the conversion of the ruler was followed by the compulsory baptism of his subjects. Some were evangelization by monks or priests, organic growth within an partly Christianized society, or by campaigns against paganism such as the conversion of pagan temples into Christian churches or the condemnation of pagan gods and practices. A strategy for Christianization was Interpretatio Christiana – the practice of converting native pagan practices and culture, pagan religious imagery, pagan sites and the pagan calendar to Christian uses, due to the Christian efforts at proselytism based on the Great Commission. Reformatting native religious and cultural activities and beliefs into a Christianized form was sanctioned. In essence, it was intended that the traditions and practices still existed, but that the reasoning behind them was altered.
The existence of syncretism in Christian tradition has long been recognized by scholars. Since the 16th century and till modern days, significant scholarship was devoted to deconstruction of interpretatio christiana, i.e. tracing the roots of some Christian practices and traditions to paganism. Early works of this type have tended to be downplayed and dismissed as a form of Protestant apologetics aimed at "purification" of Christianity; the Council of Jerusalem, according to Acts 15, agreed that lack of circumcision could not be a basis for excluding Gentile believers from membership in the Jesus community. Rather, they instructed new believers to avoid "pollution of idols, things strangled, blood", expecting them to hear Moses read on the Sabbath days; these clarifications were put into writing, distributed by messengers present at the Council, were received as an encouragement to the growth of these gentiles' trust in the God of Israel as revealed in the Gospel. The Apostolic Decree thus helped to establish nascent Christianity as a unique alternative among the forms of Judaism for prospective Proselytes.
The Twelve Apostles and the Apostolic Fathers initiated the process of transforming the Jewish sect into a diaspora of communities composed of both Jews and gentiles, united by their trust in Jesus. The Armenian and Ethiopian churches are the only instances of imposition of Christianity by sovereign rulers predating the council of Nicaea; the initial conversion of the Roman Empire occurred in urban areas of Europe, where the first conversions were sometimes among members of the Jewish population. Conversions happened among the Grecian-Roman-Celtic populations over centuries initially among its urban population, with rural conversions taking place some time later; the term "pagan" is from Latin and means "villager, civilian." It is derived from this historical transition. The root of that word is present in today's word "paisan" or "paisano"; the Christianization of the Roman Empire is divided into two phases and after the year 312, which marked the momentous conversion of Constantine. By this date, Christianity had converted a significant but unknown proportion of at least the urban population of the empire including a small number of the elite classes.
Constantine ended the intermittent persecution of Christianity with the Edict of Milan, in fact a quote from a letter of the emperor Licinius by Eusebius, which granted tolerance to all religions, but mentions Christianity. Under Constantine's successors, Christianization of Roman society proceeded by fits and starts, as John Curran documented in detail. Constantine's sons did not close the temples. Although all state temples in all cities were ordered shut in 356, there is evidence that traditional sacrifices continued. Under Julian, the temples were state religious sacrifices performed once more; when Gratian, emperor 376-383, declined the office and title of Pontifex Maximus, his act brought an end to the state religion due to the position's authority and ties within the Imperial administration. Again, this process ended state official practices but not private religious devotion; as Christianity spread, many of the ancient pagan temples were defiled, destroyed, or converted into Christian sites by such figures as Martin of Tours, in the East by militant monks.
However, many temples remained open until Theodosius I's edict of Thessalonica in 381 banned haruspices and other pagan religious practices. From 389 to 393 he issued a series of decrees which led to the banning of pagan religious rites, the confiscation of their property and endowments; the Olympic Games were banned in 392 because of their association with the old religion. Further laws were passed against remaining pagan practices over the course of the following years; the effectiveness of these laws empire-wide is debatable. Christianization of the central Balkans is documented at the end of the 4th century, where Nicetas the Bishop of Remesiana brought the gospel to "those mountain wolves"
Great Moravia
Great Moravia, the Great Moravian Empire, or Moravia, was the first major state, predominantly West Slavic to emerge in the area of Central Europe, chiefly on what is now the territory of the Czech Republic, Poland and Serbia. The only formation preceding it in these territories was Samo's Empire known from between 631 and 658 AD. Great Moravia was thus the first joint state of the Slavonic tribes that became known as Czechs and Slovaks and that formed Czechoslovakia, its core territory is the region now called Moravia in the eastern part of the Czech Republic alongside the Morava River, which gave its name to the kingdom. The kingdom saw the rise of the first Slavic literary culture in the Old Church Slavonic language as well as the expansion of Christianity after the arrival of St. Cyril and St. Methodius in 863 and the creation of the Glagolitic alphabet, the first alphabet dedicated to a Slavonic language, which had significant impact on most Slavic languages and stood at the beginning of the modern Cyrillic alphabet.
Moravia reached its largest territorial extent under the king Svätopluk I, who ruled from 870 to 894. Although the borders of his empire cannot be determined, he controlled the core territories of Moravia as well as other neighbouring regions, including Bohemia, most of Slovakia and parts of Slovenia, Hungary and Ukraine, for some periods of his reign. Separatism and internal conflicts emerging after Svätopluk's death contributed to the fall of Great Moravia, overrun by the Hungarians who included the territory of the now Slovakia in their domains; the exact date of Moravia's collapse is unknown, but it occurred between 902 and 907. Moravia experienced significant cultural development under King Rastislav, with the arrival in 863 of the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius. After his request for missionaries had been refused in Rome, Rastislav asked the Byzantine emperor to send a "teacher" to introduce literacy and a legal system to Great Moravia; the request was granted. The missionary brothers Cyril and Methodius introduced a system of writing and Slavonic liturgy, the latter formally approved by Pope Adrian II.
The Glagolitic script was invented by Cyril himself and the language he used for his translations of holy scripts and his original literary creation was based on the Slavic dialect he and his brother Methodius knew from their native Thessaloniki. The language, termed Old Church Slavonic, was the direct ancestral language for Bulgarian, therefore referred to as Old Bulgarian. Old Church Slavonic, differed somewhat from the local Slavic dialect of Great Moravia, the ancestral idiom to the dialects spoken in Moravia and western Slovakia; the disciples of Cyril and Methodius were expelled from Great Moravia by King Svätopluk I, who re-orientated the Empire to Western Christianity. The expulsion had a significant impact on countries where the disciples settled and from there continued their evangelizing missions - Southeastern Europe, firstly Bulgaria, Eastern Europe. Arriving in the First Bulgarian Empire, the disciples continued the Cyrilo-Methodian mission and the Glagolitic script was substituted by Cyrillic which used some of its letters.
Early Cyrillic alphabet was developed during the 9th century AD at the Preslav Literary School. The Cyrillic script and translations of the liturgy were disseminated to other Slavic countries in the Balkans and Kievan Rus', charting a new path in these Slavic nations' cultural development and establishing the Cyrillic alphabets as they are now known in Bulgaria, Macedonia, Montenegro, Russia and Ukraine. Cyril and Methodius were declared co-patrons of Europe by Pope John Paul II in 1980; the meaning of the name of Great Moravia has been subject to debate. The designation "Great Moravia" – Megale Moravia in Greek – stems from the work De Administrando Imperio written by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos around 950; the emperor only used the adjective megale in connection with the polity when referring to events that occurred after its fall, implying that it should rather be translated as "old" instead of "great". According to a third theory, the megale adjective refers to a territory located beyond the borders of the Byzantine Empire.
The historian Lubomír E. Havlík writes that Byzantine scholars used this adjective when referring to homelands of nomadic peoples, as demonstrated by the term "Great Bulgaria". is Belgrade, in, the tower of the holy and great Constantine, the emperor. Such are the names along the Danube river; the work of Porphyrogenitos is the only nearly contemporaneous source using the adjective "great" in connection with Moravia. Other documents from the 9th and 10th centuries never used the term in this context. Instead they mention the polity as "Moravian realm" or "realm of Moravians" "Moravia", al
Glagolitic script
The Glagolitic script is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is agreed to have been created in the 9th century by Saint Cyril, a Byzantine monk from Thessaloniki, he and his brother, Saint Methodius, were sent by the Byzantine Emperor Michael III in 863 to Great Moravia to spread Christianity among the West Slavs in the area. The brothers decided to translate liturgical books into the Old Slavic language, understandable to the general population, but as the words of that language could not be written by using either the Greek or Latin alphabets, Cyril decided to invent a new script, which he based on the local dialect of the Slavic tribes from the Byzantine theme of Thessalonica. After the deaths of Cyril and Methodius, the Glagolitic alphabet ceased to be used in Moravia, but their students continued to propagate it in the First Bulgarian Empire, where it was subsequently displaced by the Cyrillic alphabet; the Glagolitic alphabet was preserved only by the clergy of Croatia to write Church Slavonic until the early 19th century.
The name was not created until many centuries after the script's creation, comes from the Old Church Slavonic глаголъ glagol "utterance". The verb glagolati means "to speak", it has been conjectured that the name glagolitsa developed in Croatia around the 14th century and was derived from the word glagolity, applied to adherents of the liturgy in Slavonic. The creation of the characters is popularly attributed to Saints Cyril and Methodius, who may have created them to facilitate the introduction of Christianity, it is believed. The number of letters in the original Glagolitic alphabet is not known, but it may have been close to its presumed Greek model; the 41 letters known today include letters for non-Greek sounds, which may have been added by Saint Cyril, as well as ligatures added in the 12th century under the influence of Cyrillic, as Glagolitic lost its dominance. In centuries, the number of letters dropped to fewer than 30 in modern Croatian and Czech recensions of the Church Slavic language.
Twenty-four of the 41 original Glagolitic letters derive from graphemes of the medieval cursive Greek small alphabet but have been given an ornamental design. The source of the other consonantal letters is unknown. If they were added by Cyril, it is that they were taken from an alphabet used for Christian scripture, it is proposed that the letters sha Ⱎ, tsi Ⱌ, cherv Ⱍ were taken from the letters shin ש and tsadi צ of the Hebrew alphabet, that Ⰶ zhivete derives from Coptic janja Ϫ. However, Cubberley suggests that if a single prototype were presumed, the most source would be Armenian. Other proposals include the Samaritan alphabet, which Cyril learned during his journey to the Khazars in Cherson. Glagolitic letters were used as numbers to Cyrillic numerals. Unlike Cyrillic numerals, which inherited their numeric value from the corresponding Greek letter, Glagolitic letters were assigned values based on their native alphabetic order; the two monks canonized as Saints Cyril and Methodius, brothers from Thessaloniki, were sent to Great Moravia in 862 by the Byzantine emperor at the request of Prince Rastislav, who wanted to weaken the dependence of his country on East Frankish priests.
The Glagolitic alphabet, however it originated, was used between 863 and 885 for government and religious documents and books and at the Great Moravian Academy founded by the missionaries, where their followers were educated. The Kiev Missal, found in the 19th century in Jerusalem, was dated to the 10th century. In 886 an East Frankish bishop of Nitra named Wiching banned the script and jailed 200 followers of Methodius students of the original academy, they were dispersed or, according to some sources, sold as slaves by the Franks. Many of them, reached Bulgaria and were commissioned by Boris I of Bulgaria to teach and instruct the future clergy of the state in the Slavic languages. After the adoption of Christianity in Bulgaria in 865, religious ceremonies and Divine Liturgy were conducted in Greek by clergy sent from the Byzantine Empire, using the Byzantine rite. Fearing growing Byzantine influence and weakening of the state, Boris viewed the introduction of the Slavic alphabet and language into church use as a way to preserve the independence of the Bulgarian Empire from Byzantine Constantinople.
As a result of Boris' measures, two academies, one in Ohrid and one in Preslav, were founded. From there, the students spread the use of their alphabet; some went to Croatia, where the squared variant arose and where Glagolitic remained in use for a long time. In 1248, Pope Innocent IV granted the Croatians of southern Dalmatia the unique privilege of using their own language and this script in the Roman Rite liturgy. Formally granted to bishop Philip of Senj, permission to use the Glagolitic liturgy extended to all Croatian lands along the Adriatic coast; the Holy See had several Glagolitic missals published in Rome. Authorization for the use of this language was extended to some other Slavic regions between 1886 and 1935. In missals, the Glagolitic script was replaced with the Latin alphabet, but the use of the Slavic language in the Mass continued, until replaced by modern vernacular languages; some students of the Ohrid academy went to Bohemia where the alphabet was used in the 10th and 11th centuries, along with other scripts.
It is not clear whether the G
Eastern Orthodox Church
The Eastern Orthodox Church the Orthodox Catholic Church, is the second-largest Christian church, with 200–260 million members. It operates as a communion of autocephalous churches, each governed by its bishops in local synods, although half of Eastern Orthodox Christians live in Russia; the church has no central doctrinal or governmental authority analogous to the Bishop of Rome, but the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople is recognised by all as primus inter pares of the bishops. As one of the oldest religious institutions in the world, the Eastern Orthodox Church has played a prominent role in the history and culture of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the Caucasus, the Near East. Eastern Orthodox theology is based on the Nicene Creed; the church teaches that it is the One, Holy and Apostolic church established by Jesus Christ in his Great Commission, that its bishops are the successors of Christ's apostles. It maintains, its patriarchates, reminiscent of the pentarchy, autocephalous and autonomous churches reflect a variety of hierarchical organisation.
Of its innumerable sacred mysteries, it recognises seven major sacraments, of which the Eucharist is the principal one, celebrated liturgically in synaxis. The church teaches that through consecration invoked by a priest, the sacrificial bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ; the Virgin Mary is venerated in the Eastern Orthodox Church as the God-bearer, honoured in devotions. The Eastern Orthodox Church shared communion with the Roman Catholic Church until the East–West Schism in 1054, triggered by disputes over doctrine the authority of the Pope. Before the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451, the Oriental Orthodox churches shared in this communion, separating over differences in Christology; the majority of Eastern Orthodox Christians live in Southeast and Eastern Europe, Cyprus and other communities in the Caucasus region, communities in Siberia reaching the Russian Far East. There are smaller communities in the former Byzantine regions of the Eastern Mediterranean, in the Middle East where it is decreasing due to persecution.
There are many in other parts of the world, formed through diaspora and missionary activity. In keeping with the church's teaching on universality and with the Nicene Creed, Orthodox authorities such as Saint Raphael of Brooklyn have insisted that the full name of the church has always included the term "Catholic", as in "Holy Orthodox Catholic Apostolic Church"; the official name of the Eastern Orthodox Church is the "Orthodox Catholic Church". It is the name by which the church refers to itself in its liturgical or canonical texts, in official publications, in official contexts or administrative documents. Orthodox teachers refer to the church as Catholic; this name and longer variants containing "Catholic" are recognised and referenced in other books and publications by secular or non-Orthodox writers. The common name of the church, "Eastern Orthodox Church", is a shortened practicality that helps to avoid confusions in casual use. From ancient times through the first millennium, Greek was the most prevalent shared language in the demographic regions where the Byzantine Empire flourished, Greek, being the language in which the New Testament was written, was the primary liturgical language of the church.
For this reason, the eastern churches were sometimes identified as "Greek" before the Great Schism of 1054. After 1054, "Greek Orthodox" or "Greek Catholic" marked a church as being in communion with Constantinople, much as "Catholic" did for communion with Rome; this identification with Greek, became confusing with time. Missionaries brought Orthodoxy to many regions without ethnic Greeks, where the Greek language was not spoken. In addition, struggles between Rome and Constantinople to control parts of Southeastern Europe resulted in the conversion of some churches to Rome, which also used "Greek Catholic" to indicate their continued use of the Byzantine rites. Today, many of those same churches remain, while a large number of Orthodox are not of Greek national origin, do not use Greek as the language of worship. "Eastern" indicates the geographical element in the Church's origin and development, while "Orthodox" indicates the faith, as well as communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.
There are additional Christian churches in the east that are in communion with neither Rome nor Constantinople, who tend to be distinguished by the category named "Oriental Orthodox". While the church continues to call itself "Catholic", for reasons of universality, the common title of "Eastern Orthodox Church" avoids casual confusion with the Roman Catholic Church; the first known use of the phrase "the catholic Church" occurred in a letter written about 110 AD from one Greek church to another. The letter states: "Wheresoever the bishop shall appear, there let the people be as where Jesus may be, there is the universal Church." Thus from the beginning, Christians referred to the Church as the "One, Holy and Apostolic Church". The Eastern Orthodox Church claims that it is today the continuation and preservation of that same early Church. A number of other Christian churches make a similar claim: the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion, the Assyrian Church and the Oriental Orthodox.
In the Eastern Orthodox v
Kiev
Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and most populous city of Ukraine, located in the north-central part of the country on the Dnieper. The population in July 2015 was 2,887,974. Kiev is an important industrial, scientific and cultural center of Eastern Europe, it is home to many high-tech industries, higher education institutions, world-famous historical landmarks. The city has an extensive infrastructure and developed system of public transport, including the Kiev Metro; the city's name is said to derive from the name of one of its four legendary founders. During its history, one of the oldest cities in Eastern Europe, passed through several stages of great prominence and relative obscurity; the city existed as a commercial centre as early as the 5th century. A Slavic settlement on the great trade route between Scandinavia and Constantinople, Kiev was a tributary of the Khazars, until its capture by the Varangians in the mid-9th century. Under Varangian rule, the city became a capital of the first East Slavic state.
Destroyed during the Mongol invasions in 1240, the city lost most of its influence for the centuries to come. It was a provincial capital of marginal importance in the outskirts of the territories controlled by its powerful neighbours; the city prospered again during the Russian Empire's Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century. In 1917, after the Ukrainian National Republic declared independence from the Russian Empire, Kiev became its capital. From 1921 onwards Kiev was a city of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, proclaimed by the Red Army, from 1934, Kiev was its capital. During World War II, the city again suffered significant damage, but recovered in the post-war years, remaining the third largest city of the Soviet Union. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and Ukrainian independence in 1991, Kiev remained the capital of Ukraine and experienced a steady migration influx of ethnic Ukrainians from other regions of the country. During the country's transformation to a market economy and electoral democracy, Kiev has continued to be Ukraine's largest and richest city.
Kiev's armament-dependent industrial output fell after the Soviet collapse, adversely affecting science and technology. But new sectors of the economy such as services and finance facilitated Kiev's growth in salaries and investment, as well as providing continuous funding for the development of housing and urban infrastructure. Kiev emerged as the most pro-Western region of Ukraine where parties advocating tighter integration with the European Union dominate during elections. Kiev is the traditional and most used English name for the city; the Ukrainian government however uses Kyiv as the mandatory romanization where legislative and official acts are translated into English. As a prominent city with a long history, its English name was subject to gradual evolution; the early English spelling was derived from Old East Slavic form Kyjevŭ. The name is associated with that of the legendary eponymous founder of the city. Early English sources use various names, including Kiou, Kiew, Kiovia. On one of the oldest English maps of the region, Moscoviae et Tartariae published by Ortelius the name of the city is spelled Kiou.
On the 1650 map by Guillaume de Beauplan, the name of the city is Kiiow, the region was named Kÿowia. In the book Travels, by Joseph Marshall, the city is referred to as Kiovia; the form Kiev is based on Russian orthography and pronunciation, during a time when Kiev was in the Russian Empire. In English, Kiev was used in print as early as in 1804 in the John Cary's "New map of Europe, from the latest authorities" in "Cary's new universal atlas" published in London; the English travelogue titled New Russia: Journey from Riga to the Crimea by way of Kiev, by Mary Holderness was published in 1823. By 1883, the Oxford English Dictionary included Kiev in a quotation. Kyiv is the romanized version of the name of the city used in modern Ukrainian. Following independence in 1991, the Ukrainian government introduced the national rules for transliteration of geographic names from Ukrainian into English. According to the rules, the Ukrainian Київ transliterates into Kyiv; this has established the use of the spelling Kyiv in all official documents issued by the governmental authorities since October 1995.
The spelling is used by the United Nations, European Union, all English-speaking foreign diplomatic missions, several international organizations, Encarta encyclopedia, by some media in Ukraine. In October 2006, the United States Board on Geographic Names unanimously voted to change its standard transliteration to Kyiv, effective for the entire U. S. government, although'Kiev' remains the BGN conventional name for this city. The alternate romanizations Kyyiv and Kyjiv are in use in English-language atlases. Many major English-language news sources like the BBC, The New York Times continue to prefer Kiev, but others have adopted Kyiv in their style guides, including The Economist and The Guardian. Kiev, one of the oldest cities of Eastern Europe, played a pivotal role in the development of the medieval East Slavic civilization as well as in the modern Ukrainian nation. Scholars debate as to period of the foundation of the city: some date the founding to the late 9th century, other historians
Christ Pantocrator
In Christian iconography, Christ Pantocrator is a specific depiction of Christ. Pantocrator or Pantokrator is, used in this context, derived from of one of many names of God in Judaism; the Pantokrator an Eastern Orthodox or Eastern Catholic theological conception, is less common by that name in Western Catholicism and unknown to most Protestants. In the West the equivalent image in art is known as Christ in Majesty, which developed a rather different iconography. Christ Pantocrator has come to suggest Christ as a stern, all-powerful judge of humanity; when the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek as the Septuagint, Pantokrator was used both for YHWH Sabaoth "Lord of Hosts" and for El Shaddai "God Almighty". In the New Testament, Pantokrator is used once by Paul and nine times in the Book of Revelation: 1:8, 4:8, 11:17, 15:3, 16:7, 16:14, 19:6, 19:15, 21:22; the references to God and Christ in Revelation are at times interchangeable, Pantokrator appears to be reserved for God except in 1:8.
The most common translation of Pantocrator is "Almighty" or "All-powerful". In this understanding, Pantokrator is a compound word formed from the Greek words πᾶς, pas, i.e. "all" and κράτος, kratos, i.e. "strength", "might", "power". This is understood in terms of potential power. Another, more literal translation is "Ruler of All" or, less "Sustainer of the World". In this understanding, Pantokrator is a compound word formed from the Greek for "all" and the verb meaning "To accomplish something" or "to sustain something"; this translation speaks more to God's actual power. God does everything; the icon of Christ Pantokrator is one of the most common religious images of Orthodox Christianity. Speaking, in Medieval eastern roman church art and architecture, an iconic mosaic or fresco of Christ Pantokrator occupies the space in the central dome of the church, in the half-dome of the apse, or on the nave vault; some scholars consider the Pantocrator a Christian adaptation of images of Zeus, such as the great statue of Zeus enthroned at Olympia.
The development of the earliest stages of the icon from Roman Imperial imagery is easier to trace. The image of Christ Pantocrator was one of the first images of Christ developed in the Early Christian Church and remains a central icon of the Eastern Orthodox Church. In the half-length image, Christ holds the New Testament in his left hand and makes the gesture of teaching or of blessing with his right; the typical Western Christ in Majesty is a full-length icon. In the early Middle Ages, it presented Christ in a mandorla or other geometric frame, surrounded by the Four Evangelists or their symbols; the oldest known surviving example of the icon of Christ Pantocrator was painted in encaustic on panel in the sixth or seventh century, survived the period of destruction of images during the Iconoclastic disputes that twice racked the Eastern church, 726 to 787 and 814 to 842. It was preserved in the remote desert of the Sinai; the gessoed panel, finely painted using a wax medium on a wooden panel, had been coarsely overpainted around the face and hands at some time around the thirteenth century.
When the overpainting was cleaned in 1962, the ancient image was revealed to be a high-quality icon produced in Constantinople. The icon, traditionally half-length when in a semi-dome, which became adopted for panel icons depicts Christ frontal with a somewhat melancholy and stern aspect, with the right hand raised in blessing or, in the early encaustic panel at Saint Catherine's Monastery, the conventional rhetorical gesture that represents teaching; the left hand holds a closed book with a richly decorated cover featuring the Cross, representing the Gospels. An icon where Christ has an open book is called "Christ the Teacher", a variant of the Pantocrator. Christ is bearded, his brown hair centrally parted, his head is surrounded by a halo; the icon is shown against a gold background comparable to the gilded grounds of mosaic depictions of the Christian emperors. The name of Christ is written on each side of the halo, as IC and XC. Christ's fingers are depicted in a pose that represents the letters IC, X and C, thereby making the Christogram ICXC.
The IC is composed of the Greek characters iota and lunate sigma —the first and last letters of'Jesus' in Greek. In many cases, Christ has a cruciform halo inscribed with the letters Ο Ω Ν, i.e. ὁ ὢν "He Who Is". Christ in Majesty Christ the Redeemer Depiction of Jesus Monumento al Divino Salvador del Mundo Salvator Mundi Transfiguration of Jesus The Christ Pantocrator Icon at St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai The icon Christ Pantocrator at Chilandar Monastery on Holy Mount Athos The Deesis Pantocrator in Hagia Sophia
