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KAZAKHSTAN Yakov, the orthodox priest who prays in Kazakh

A priest of the Patriarchate of Moscow, highly critical of the invasion of Ukraine, on the occasion of Easter released a video with readings and prayers in the local language: “We have long ceased to be a Russian colony and we must fight for our future, a country multi-ethnic”.

Astana () – During the recent Easter celebrations, a Kazakh Orthodox priest of the Moscow Patriarchate who lives in Akmola, Father Jakov Vorontsov, recited the prayers in the Kazakh language, causing great concern both in church leaders and in external circles of society, and even in the world of local Muslims. The p. Jakov defends the need to find new ways to proclaim the Gospel to the Kazakh people, and as for the war in Ukraine, he believes that the local Orthodox should separate from the Moscow patriarchate.

The video with prayers in the local language has been widely shared on social media, where Fr. Jakov is well known for his frequent Facebook posts condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He also claims that Kazakhstan should pull out of all the institutions in which it sits alongside Russia, from the Eurasian Economic Union to the CSTO, the military alliance.

Interviewed by Azattyk, the priest says that “he grew up listening to other children speak Kazakh” and that he has always been interested in music and songs in the local language: “it is an organic part of my understanding of the world,” he says. During his childhood, the linguistic issue was not given much importance, but today it is becoming crucial. Fr Jakov remembers a friend, the poet and dancer Djusibek Nakipov, who at the age of 20 told him to study Kazakh, because “without his language, Kazakhstan has no future.”

In recent times he has dedicated himself to studying Kazakh, especially as a reaction to the events of last year, when “we had to decide which side we were on, with independent Kazakhstan or with the country that savagely attacked its neighbors.” In Kazakhstan there are many organizations trying to show that nothing can be done without Russia and that the Central Asian country is part of the “Russian world”, but “I see that today in Moscow there is a regime of cannibals, who want to restore the Stalinist traditions, the of the peoples without God”.

The priest claims that he feels like a Kazakh like all other citizens, regardless of the Russian nationality written in his passport. “We have long ceased to be a Russian colony, and we must fight for our future as a multi-ethnic nation,” he says. After trying to learn the language on his own, watching movies and television and reading books, Father Jakov began to take private classes to be able to adapt to a linguistic model completely different from Russian, which “implies a different vision of the world”.

Kazakh linguist Kanat Tasibekov explains that to learn to speak Kazakh “you first have to start thinking in Kazakh,” a Turanic language that is also very different from Turkish and the product of a nomadic culture whose natives themselves do not fully master their language. The most important thing is to “appropriate the original links of history and culture”, overcoming psychological barriers even before philological ones.

Vorontsov’s father became friends with an American Baptist pastor who ministers in Almaty, in the Akikat church, “The Truth”, who does not know Russian but speaks Kazakh quite a bit. A very sui generis ecumenical and personal dialogue began with him. Communication was easier for him than with his compatriots who speak both Kazakh and Russian, and it was there that he best understood the meaning of the “psychological barrier.” After that, the Orthodox also began to read and comment on the Gospel in Kazakh on social networks, quickly becoming very popular.

In this new experience of evangelization, Fr. Jakov later met another Orthodox priest of Kazakh ethnicity, Fr. Elisej Kukeev, who has been translating religious literature for a long time. In the Easter proclamation of the Gospel, it is traditional to use different languages, including Greek and Latin, and at the initiative of Vorontsov, in all the churches of Almaty it was also read in Kazakh, as an announcement of a new stage of faith and dialogue. among the peoples against all wars and conflicts of the soul.



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