page_title: History of Christianity in Ukraine
section_title: Union of Brest and its aftermath
hierarchical_section_title: History of Christianity in Ukraine / After the breakup of the Kievan Rus / Union of Brest and its aftermath
caption_attribution_description: English: A Ukrainian religious painting, from an iconostasis, showing the Adoration of the Shepherds. Tempera on wood.
context_page_description: The history of Christianity in Ukraine dates back to the earliest centuries of the history of Christianity, to the Apostolic Age, with mission trips along the Black Sea and a legend of Saint Andrew even ascending the hills of Kiev. It has remained the dominant religion in the country since its acceptance in 988 by Vladimir the Great, who brought it from Byzantine Crimea and instated it as the state religion of medieval Kievan Rus', with the metropolitan see in Kiev.
  Although separated into various Christian denominations, most Ukrainian Christians share a common faith based on the Eastern Christianity. This tradition is represented in Ukraine by the Byzantine Rite, the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches, which have been at various historic times closely aligned with Ukrainian national self-identity and Byzantine culture.
  Currently, two major Ukrainian Eastern Orthodox Churches coexist, and often compete, in the country: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Additionally, a significant body of Christians belong to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church of the Catholic Church, and a smaller number are in the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church.
context_section_description: In order to oppose such restrictions and to reverse cultural polonization of Orthodox bishops, the Ecumenical Patriarch encouraged the activity of the Orthodox urban communities called the "brotherhoods" (bratstvo). In 1589 Hedeon Balaban, the bishop of Lviv, asked the Pope to take him under his protection, because he was exasperated by the struggle with urban communities and the Ecumenical Patriarch. He was followed by the bishops of Lutsk, Cholm, and Turov in 1590. In the following years, the bishops of Volodymyr-Volynskyy and Przemyśl and the Metropolitan of Kiev announced their secession from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, which was increasingly influenced by the Ottomans. In 1595 some representatives of this group arrived to Rome and asked Pope Clement VIII to take them under his jurisdiction and unite them to the Apostolic See of Saint Peter.
  In the Union of Brest of 1596 (colloquially known as unia), a part of the Ukrainian Church was accepted under the jurisdiction of the Roman Pope, becoming a Byzantine Rite Catholic Church, a Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, colloquially known as the Uniate Church. While the new church gained many faithful among the Ukrainians in Galicia, the majority of Ukrainians in the rest of the lands remained within Eastern Orthodoxy with the church affairs ruled by then from Kiev under the metropolitan Petro Mohyla. The Orthodox Church was made illegal (its legality was partially restored in 1607), its property confiscated, and Orthodox believers faced persecution and discrimination which became an important reason for large numbers of Ukrainians to emigrate to Tsardom of Russia following the Union. The eastward spread of the Union of Brest led to violent clashes, for example, assassination of the Greek Catholic Archbishop Josaphat Kuntsevych by the Orthodox mob in Vitebsk in 1623.
caption: Christmas icon, Adoration of the Shepherds, from the Ivan Honchar Museum collection. Artist unknown, c. 1670.
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