Lipovans

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Lipovans (Russian Old Believers) during a ceremony in front of their church in the Romanian village of Slava Cercheză in 2004 (photo by Mikhail Evstafiev.)

Lipovans or Lippovans (Липовани in Ukrainian, Lipoveni in Romanian, Russian: Липоване, Bulgarian: Липованци) are the Old Believers, mostly of Russian ethnic origin, who settled in the delta of the Danube River in Tulcea county in the Dobrogea region of eastern Romania and in the southern part of Odessa Oblast as well as in Chernivtsi Oblast in Ukraine as well as in two villages in North-Eastern Bulgaria. According to the 2002 Romanian census there are a total of 35,791 Lipovans in Romania, of whom 21,623 still live in Dobrogea.

They emigrated from Russia over 200 years ago as dissenters with the mainline Russian Orthodox Church. They settled along the Prut River in Moldova and in the Danube Delta. They have maintained strong religious traditions that predate the reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church undertaken during the reign of Patriarch Nikon. When he made changes to worship in 1652, part of the believers carried on worshipping in the "old way". In that sense, they continued to speak Old Russian, to cross themselves with two fingers instead of three, and to keep their beards. The Russian government and the Orthodox Church persecuted them and as a result some committed suicide by burning themselves, with many other being forced to emigrate.

The main centre of Lipovan community in Ukraine is Vilkovo. In this town, they built their own church, St Nicholas. In order to construct their homes, the Lipovans created islets of dry land by digging mud out from trenches and put into work a series of canals. The house walls were made of reed and mud, and thatching was standard for the roofing. Because this characteristic materials, the buildings had a tendency to sink into the mud and needed to be rebuilt every few years^[1]^[2].