This 1950s postcard of the town Svidník may not seem interesting at first glance, but it captures a barely noticeable, yet significant detail: the house in the bottom left corner of the photo bears a sign with Cyrillic text. This is not so surprising, though, as Svidník lies in the north east of Slovakia, in an area densely populated by Ruthenians.

Not much is known about the Ruthenians’ origins. What we do know is that some time in the 14th and 17th centuries, a relatively compact Ruthenian settlement existed along the Polish-Ukrainian border. What differentiated Ruthenians from Slovaks was their language and religious practices. While Slovaks represented western Slavs with their language and Roman Catholic religion, Ruthenian language and Orthodox practices aligned them with the eastern Slavs.

As the Eastern Orthodox Church was barely tolerated in the Hungarian Kingdom, its priests had inferior social status compared to those in the Roman Catholic clergy. The Habsburgs’ allies, the Drugeth family, invited Orthodox priests from eastern Slovakia and Transcarpathian Ukraine to their castle in Uzhgorod. There, on the day of St George (April 24, 1646), they announced the creation of a union with Rome, signifying the unification of Eastern Orthodox belief with the Roman Catholic Church, called the Union of Uzhgorod.

In 1949, Soviet authorities "revoked" the Union, creating the Orthodox Eparchy of Mukachiv-Uzhhorod, under the Patriarch of Moscow. In the late 1980s the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church was re-established in Transcarpathia, following the easing of Soviet religious persecution.

This article was originally published by The Slovak Spectator on July 14, 2014. It has been updated to be relevant today.

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