The End of the World in the Carpathians: Story and Pictures to Follow!

The hardcover version has been out for a few years, but helpfully a more affordable paperback version will appear this month of John-Paul Himka's unique and important study Last Judgment Iconography in the Carpathians (University of Toronto Press, 2018), 368pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

Few subjects in Christianity have inspired artists as much as the last judgment. Last Judgment Iconography in the Carpathians examines images of the last judgment from the fifteenth century to the present in the Carpathian mountain region of Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, and Romania, as a way to consider history free from the traditional frameworks and narratives of nations. Over ten years, John-Paul Himka studied last-judgment images throughout the Carpathians and found a distinctive and transnational blending of Gothic, Byzantine, and Novgorodian art in the region.

Piecing together the story of how these images were produced and how they developed, Himka traces their origins on linden boards and their evolution on canvas and church walls. Tracing their origins with monks, he follows these images' increased popularity as they were commissioned by peasants and shepherds whose tastes so shocked bishops that they ordered the destruction of depictions of sexual themes and grotesque forms of torture. A richly illustrated and detailed account of history through a style of art, Last Judgment Iconography in the Carpathians will find a receptive audience with art historians, religious scholars, and slavists.

Ukrainian Images of the Last Judgment

When I was last at a conference with John-Paul Himka two years ago, he told me this book was in the works. It builds on his earlier work, Last Judgment Iconography in the Carpathians. I am delighted to see it in print at last. Nobody with an interest in Slavic iconography will want to be without The World to Come: Ukrainian Images of the Last Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2015), 410pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Icons and murals depicting the biblical scene of the Last Judgment adorned many Eastern-rite churches in medieval and early modern Ukraine. Dating from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, these images were extraordinarily elaborate, composed of dozens of discrete elements reflecting Byzantine, Novgorodian, Moldavian, and Catholic influences, in addition to local and regional traditions. Over time, the details of the iconography evolved in response to changing cultural resources, the conditions of material life at the time, and new trends in mentality and taste.

The World to Come lists and describes more than eighty Last Judgment images from present-day Ukraine, eastern Slovakia, and southeastern Poland, making it the largest compilation of its kind. Photographs show overviews and details of the images, and most are printed in full color. The icons and murals provide a valuable source of knowledge about the culture in which they were created: what was meant by good and evil, what was prophesied for the future, and what awaited in the afterlife.

The Polish Orthodox Church

Though Poland is of course an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country, its position in Eastern Europe, and its shifting borders over the years, has meant that at times it has greater and lesser populations of Eastern Christians living within her borders or very nearby. A new book examines one such group: Edward D. Wynot,The Polish Orthodox Church in the Twentieth Century and Beyond: Prisoner of History Lexington Books, 2014), 158pp.


About this book we are told:

The Polish Orthodox Church in the Twentieth Century and Beyond: Prisoner of History shows the adaptability of an Orthodox community whose members are a religious and ethnic minority in a predominantly Roman Catholic country populated by ethnic Poles. It features a triangular relationship among the Orthodox and Catholic hierarchies and the secular state of Poland throughout the changes of government. A secondary interrelationship involves the tense relationship between ethnic Poles on one hand, and minority Ukrainians and Belarusans on the other. As a “prisoner” of its own history and strangers in its own land, the Polish Orthodox Church faces a constant struggle for survival.