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Believers―Orthodox Christians who rejected seventeenth-century religious reforms in Russia―has struggled for survival, withdrawn from the world while simultaneously trying to engage with it.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 migration to 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 the persistence of this community in contemporary Romania. Vlad Naumescu examines their ways of making history, pursuing continuity, and inscribing their historical experience into a narrative of radical hope. The interwoven life stories of the Old Believers challenge broader dichotomies of the secular and the religious, socialist and post-socialist, and continuity and rupture, revealing a community whose obligation to bear the past sanctifies the present and gives scope to the future. Against the threats of spiritual doubt, ritual failure, and lacking priesthood that have defined centuries of religious crisis, Old Belief has already provided its adherents the means to turn rupture into continuity, loss into creative transformation, and endings into beginnings.  

Living in the End Times reveals how the most orthodox of Eastern Christians became modern by staying true to their faith, inviting us to reconsider 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.