Living in the End Times: Ritual, History, and Ethics in Romania's Old Belief

In the Danube Delta, on the border between Romania and Ukraine, a shrinking community of Russian Old Believers―Orthodox Christians who rejected seventeenth-century religious reforms in Russia―has struggled for survival, withdrawn from the world while simultaneously trying to engage with it. Waves of social change, from internal divisions and migrationto external secularization and modernization, have reinforced this community's commitment to the old Orthodox rites and customs, as well as their long-standing conviction that the end times are imminent.

Living in the End Times offers an in-depth ethnographic and historical exploration of thepersistence of this community in contemporary Romania. Vlad Naumescu examines theirways of making history, pursuing continuity, and inscribing their historical experience into anarrative of radical hope.The interwoven life stories of the Old Believers challenge broaderdichotomiesof the secular and the religious, socialist and post-socialist, and continuity andrupture, revealing a community whose obligation to bear the pastsanctifies the present and gives scope to the future.Againstthe threats of spiritual doubt, ritual failure, and lacking priesthood that have definedcenturies of religious crisis,Old Belief has already provided its adherents the meansto turn rupture into continuity, loss into creative transformation, and endings intobeginnings.

Living in the End Times reveals how the most orthodox of Eastern Christians became modern by staying true to their faith, inviting us toreconsider the nature of orthodoxy, historicity and modernity.

Vlad Naumescu is Professor of Anthropology at Central European University. He is author of Modes of Religiosity in Eastern Christianity: Religious Processes and Social Change in Ukraine.