GORELOVKA, Georgia (AP) — A 10-year-old boy proudly stands beside his father and listens to the monotone chanting of elderly women clad in embroidered headscarves and long colorful skirts. It is Ilya's first time attending a night prayer meeting in Gorelovka, a tiny village in the South Caucasus nation of Georgia, and he is determined to follow the centuries-old hymns that have been passed down through the generations. There is no priest and no iconography.
It's just men and women praying together, as the Doukhobors have done since the pacifist Christian sect emerged in Russia in the 18th century. Thousands of their ancestors were expelled to the fringes of the Russian Empire almost two centuries ago for rejecting the Orthodox church and refusing to serve in Czar Nicholas I's army — much like the thousands of men who fled Russia two years ago to avoid being drafted to join Moscow's invasion of Ukraine. Today, only about 100 Doukhobors remain in the tight-knit Russian-speaking farming community in two remote mountainous villages.
“Our people are dying,” 47-year-old Svetlana Svetlishcheva, Ilya's mother, tells The Associated Press, as she walks with her family to an ancient cemetery. Some 5,000 Doukhobors who were banished in the middle of the 19th century established 10 villages close to the border with the hostile Ottoman Empire, where they continued to preach nonviolence and worshipped without priests or church rituals. The community prospered, growing to around 20,0.
