‘This season is difficult’: Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw mark Orthodox Easter away from home | Ukraine

EITHERna sunny Saturday afternoon in Warsaw, a crowd of people pour out from the gates of the Eastern Orthodox Cathedral of St Mary Magdalen. The queue of families carrying wicker baskets covered in embroidered cloth stretches on to the street and wraps around the cathedral wall. While Holy Saturday is one of the busiest days for any Eastern Orthodox church, this was unusual for a parish which usually serves only 1,000 faithful.

“We have never seen anything like this. We never had to give blessings outside the church,” said the 86-year-old parish priest, Anatoli Szydłowski, who had been standing by the entrance to the cathedral, frantically trying to direct the ever-growing crowd since 11am. He expects he will have to stay there, directing people hoping to have their Easter food blessed, until the mass starts at 8pm. However, he is not joyous about the sudden expansion in his parish’s faithful. “We did not have to do that before because we did not have the war,” he said. “They are all here because of the war.”

“You can definitely feel the 300,000 people who came to Warsaw from Ukraine,” said Milena Guliyan, 36, who was raised in an Eastern Orthodox family in Podlasie, a district in the north-east of Poland. Back home, everyone would know someone who practiced Orthodoxy, she said, but after moving to Warsaw 10 years ago, she found that many of her friends of her had never heard of her denomination of her.

“There wasn’t so much awareness of it,” said Milena’s husband, Włodzimierz Guliyan, 40. “After all, the Orthodox only make up 3% or so of the Polish population.”

But despite the crowds, many of those who came to bless their food – colorfully painted eggs, sausage and the traditional Easter cake, “pasha” – feel alone.

Oksana Bojczuk, 26, has lived in Poland for two years but had never celebrated Easter away from home. Her family de ella are in Kherson, now under Russian occupation, and this is the first time that she will not share Easter breakfast with them. “Peace,” is the only word she says, when asked about her hopes for her for this year’s holiday.

“This season is difficult, but we try to know to save our children from these difficult feelings and just make a holiday,” said Kateryna Shukh, a psychologist who fled to Poland from Mariupol at the start of the war. She now works for an NGO, Human Doc, leading group therapy for adult and child refugees.

During her last session with toddlers from Mariupol, she asked the children to draw and decorate Easter chicks, but many chose to do other drawings, showing Russian tanks and rocket launchers. “This is actually really OK and cool that they do it,” she said. “They have an opportunity to process these feelings and what’s happening to them now. Often, their parents cannot or do not want to talk about this at home.”

Shukh was hoping to accompany her grandparents to church on Saturday, but instead she will be at the border, welcoming another bus of refugees from Mariupol.

“Some people, especially from Lviv and Kyiv, returned home for the holidays, because refugee life is not easy,” she said. “But I don’t have this opportunity because my city is almost completely destroyed. People from Mariupol cannot go back, even if they really, really want to.”