KIEV -- The body of Patriarch Volodymyr of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Kiev and All-Ukraine, who was widely revered for his quiet devotion tempered by years in Soviet prison camps, lies buried ignominiously under a Kiev sidewalk, his death prompting a far greater controversy than he caused in his lifetime.
The patriarch, who died earlier this month of natural causes aged 69, was interred Tuesday near some kiosks outside the main gate of St. Sofia's Cathedral, one of Orthodox Christianity's most sacred shrines. He was laid to rest by thousands of mourners furious at the government's refusal to allow him to be buried inside the cathedral compound.
Mourners took turns swinging a crowbar at the asphalt and earth. When, after four hours, the grave was completed and the body lowered into it, riot police broke through a protective cordon of over 100 extreme-nationalist paramilitaries from the Ukrainian National Self-Defense Organization.
Metropolitan Filaret of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church said two people were killed in the pitched 20-minute street fight that ensued. The Ukrainian Interior Ministry denies this, although it says 33 people were detained.
Nationalist deputies from the Ukrainian parliament, who were among the mourners, eventually succeeded in persuading the police to back off, and at dusk the body was still in its curbside grave, piled high with flowers.
There it remains, with church and government authorities apparently conceding that it should not be moved for at least 40 days in accordance with Orthodox tradition.
President Leonid Kuchma, represented by his Chief of Staff Dmytro Tabachnik, opened negotiations with the Church Synod about when and where to rebury the body.
"We should reach a compromise decision based on one of the burial places proposed by the Cabinet," said Tabachnik at a news conference Wednesday.
But the Cabinet's special commission on the patriarch's burial proposed only two final resting places: Baikovoye Cemetery in Kiev, where many notable Ukrainian figures are buried, and under the floor of Kiev's St. Volodymyr's Cathedral, which belongs to the patriarch's branch of Orthodoxy.
The synod rejected the former site because of its secular nature, and the second as diminishing the stature of the patriarch.
But the heart of the matter surfaced when the synod's initial request to bury the patriarch in Kiev's Caves Monastery was rejected by the Cabinet. That shrine belongs to the Ukrainian Department of the Russian Orthodox Church, which refuses to recognize the legitimacy of either the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Kiev and All-Ukraine, which was founded in 1992, or the much smaller, centuries-old Ukrainian Auto-Cephalus Orthodox Church.
St. Sofia's Cathedral is administered by the government as a historical and architectural museum -- due in no small part to the uncompromising ownership claims to it by both the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox churches.
The patriarch, who died earlier this month of natural causes aged 69, was interred Tuesday near some kiosks outside the main gate of St. Sofia's Cathedral, one of Orthodox Christianity's most sacred shrines. He was laid to rest by thousands of mourners furious at the government's refusal to allow him to be buried inside the cathedral compound.
Mourners took turns swinging a crowbar at the asphalt and earth. When, after four hours, the grave was completed and the body lowered into it, riot police broke through a protective cordon of over 100 extreme-nationalist paramilitaries from the Ukrainian National Self-Defense Organization.
Metropolitan Filaret of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church said two people were killed in the pitched 20-minute street fight that ensued. The Ukrainian Interior Ministry denies this, although it says 33 people were detained.
Nationalist deputies from the Ukrainian parliament, who were among the mourners, eventually succeeded in persuading the police to back off, and at dusk the body was still in its curbside grave, piled high with flowers.
There it remains, with church and government authorities apparently conceding that it should not be moved for at least 40 days in accordance with Orthodox tradition.
President Leonid Kuchma, represented by his Chief of Staff Dmytro Tabachnik, opened negotiations with the Church Synod about when and where to rebury the body.
"We should reach a compromise decision based on one of the burial places proposed by the Cabinet," said Tabachnik at a news conference Wednesday.
But the Cabinet's special commission on the patriarch's burial proposed only two final resting places: Baikovoye Cemetery in Kiev, where many notable Ukrainian figures are buried, and under the floor of Kiev's St. Volodymyr's Cathedral, which belongs to the patriarch's branch of Orthodoxy.
The synod rejected the former site because of its secular nature, and the second as diminishing the stature of the patriarch.
But the heart of the matter surfaced when the synod's initial request to bury the patriarch in Kiev's Caves Monastery was rejected by the Cabinet. That shrine belongs to the Ukrainian Department of the Russian Orthodox Church, which refuses to recognize the legitimacy of either the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Kiev and All-Ukraine, which was founded in 1992, or the much smaller, centuries-old Ukrainian Auto-Cephalus Orthodox Church.
St. Sofia's Cathedral is administered by the government as a historical and architectural museum -- due in no small part to the uncompromising ownership claims to it by both the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox churches.