Millennium
Overview
Anniversaries of distant origins are never only about the past. They are occasions on which states, churches, scholars and political movements redefine contemporary communities, establish competing historical genealogies and claim authority over collective memory.
The Millennium project examined twentieth-century celebrations of the adoption of Christianity in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. These events referred to medieval history, but their political and cultural meanings were distinctly modern. They became instruments for constructing nations, legitimising states, mobilising religious communities and negotiating the relationship between Eastern and Western Christianity.
The comparative approach revealed that the celebrations were not isolated national events. Organisers observed and borrowed from one another; religious institutions operated across state borders; diasporas participated in commemorative programmes; and anniversaries became part of wider Cold War conflicts over sovereignty, religion and European belonging.
The project treated millennium celebrations as laboratories of memory. Archaeology, historiography, literature, religious ritual, exhibitions, monuments, film, radio and mass spectacle were brought together to create persuasive narratives of collective origin. These narratives could temporarily consolidate communities, but they also exposed internal conflicts over nationality, religion, historical continuity and political legitimacy.
Research Project
Millennium: Celebrating the Anniversary of the Baptism of Eastern and Central Europe – Comparative Analysis
2019–2025 · Principal Investigator · National Science Centre, Poland, OPUS 16
Project no. 2018/31/B/HS2/02917
The project developed a comparative cultural history of four major commemorative programmes:
- the Millennium of St Wenceslaus in Czechoslovakia in 1929;
- the competing celebrations of a thousand years of Polish Christianity and statehood in 1966;
- Croatian and Yugoslav millennium commemorations during the 1970s and 1980s;
- the Millennium of the Baptism of Kyivan Rus’ in the Soviet Union in 1988.
Each celebration activated a different relationship among state power, national identity and religion. In Czechoslovakia, the cult of St Wenceslaus was incorporated into an effort to provide the young multinational state with a shared historical language. In Poland, the Catholic Church and the communist authorities organised rival celebrations and competing accounts of national origins. In Yugoslavia, the anniversary exposed religious and political tensions between Croatian Catholic and Serbian Orthodox historical narratives. In the Soviet Union, the Millennium of the Baptism of Kyivan Rus’ became intertwined with perestroika, the revival of religious life and disputes over the Ukrainian and Russian inheritance of Rus’.
The research drew on archival documents, church and party materials, contemporary publications, photographs, posters, films, television and radio broadcasts. Its visual and media perspective showed that anniversaries produced history not only through academic arguments, but also through processions, performances, costumes, symbols and carefully staged public encounters.
National Science Centre project record
Selected Publication
“At the Crossroads of Politics and Culture: The Jubilee Celebration of the 1000th Anniversary of the Baptism of Kyivan Rus’ as a Chance of Legalization of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church”
Łukasz Gemziak and Alexandra Shtepenko. Scando-Slavica 71, no. 2, 2025, pp. 225–240.
The article examines how preparations for the 1988 Millennium of the Baptism of Kyivan Rus’ created a political and symbolic opportunity for the clandestine Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
Greek Catholics in Ukraine, supported by the Ukrainian diaspora and the Vatican, used the approaching anniversary to defend their religious rights and demand legal recognition. The jubilee changed the relationship among the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the Soviet authorities and the Russian Orthodox Church. It also attracted international attention to the suppression of religious freedom in the Soviet Union.
The article demonstrates one of the project’s central conclusions: anniversary celebrations can generate political consequences that exceed the intentions of their official organisers. A commemoration intended partly to improve the Soviet state’s international image also created new possibilities for religious mobilisation, international advocacy and the recovery of suppressed Ukrainian institutions.
Selected Talks and Public Essays
“Utopias of the Past in Millennium Celebrations: Narratives on the Origins of the State, Nation and Religion as a Response to Social Crisis”
Council for European Studies Conference, Europe’s Past, Present and Future: Utopias and Dystopias, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, 27–29 June 2023.
The paper examined how distant origins are transformed into political utopias during periods of uncertainty. Millennium celebrations do not recover an intact historical beginning. They construct idealised past communities that can be used to legitimise contemporary states, nations and religious institutions.
“Intellectuals as Memory Generators: Forging the Origins of Nations, States, Religions and Peoples”
Panel organisation and introduction, British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Conference, Glasgow, 31 March–2 April 2023.
The panel investigated the role of historians, archaeologists, writers and other intellectuals in producing narratives about collective origins. The concept of a “memory of origins” is inherently paradoxical: communities cannot remember their beginnings directly, but intellectual and cultural institutions continually reconstruct them as foundations of contemporary identity.
“Archaeology and History Serving State and Church: The Celebration of the Millennium of Poland’s Christianity and Statehood in the Perspective of the History of the Humanities”
The Making of the Humanities X, Pittsburgh, 3–5 November 2022.
The paper analysed how the communist state and the Catholic Church mobilised archaeology, history and public scholarship during the rival Polish millennium celebrations of the 1960s.
Their conflict was not merely political or religious. It was also a struggle over the authority to produce historical knowledge and to define the origins of the Polish community.
“The Restoration of ‘Displaced’ Knowledge During Perestroika: Dmitry Likhachev’s Knowledge of the History of Orthodox Christianity in the Context of Political and Social Change”
Łukasz Gemziak, The Making of the Humanities X, Pittsburgh, 3–5 November 2022.
The paper examined how knowledge about Orthodox Christianity, marginalised or displaced under Soviet rule, returned to public debate during perestroika. It showed how intellectual authority and historical scholarship helped make religious memory politically available again during the period surrounding the Millennium of the Baptism of Kyivan Rus’.
“Copernicus and the Millennium: Local Celebrations, Global Anniversaries”
The essay places millennium commemorations within a wider twentieth-century culture of anniversaries. It shows that celebrations which appear local or national were often embedded in transnational networks involving churches, socialist institutions, émigré communities and international cultural diplomacy.
The 1973 Copernican anniversary provides a particularly revealing comparison. Events devoted to Copernicus were organised not only across Europe and North America, but also in locations including Afghanistan and Ethiopia. This global commemorative geography helps demonstrate that anniversary cultures in socialist Central and Eastern Europe were never exclusively domestic.
“Anniversary Celebrations in Central and Eastern Europe”
The essay introduces the project’s wider conceptual framework. Anniversary celebrations are presented as forms of invented tradition through which modern states, nations and religious communities create coherent accounts of their origins.
It also emphasises the transnational dimensions of commemoration: institutional exchanges, ideological borrowing, religious networks and diaspora participation connected events that national historiographies frequently analyse in isolation.
“St Wenceslaus’ Millennium”
The essay examines the 1929 Czechoslovak celebrations as an attempt to construct a shared symbolic language for a young and internally diverse state.
The anniversary combined religious and state elements and sought to integrate Czech, German, Slovak and other communities around the figure of St Wenceslaus. Its limits reveal how historical symbols can temporarily cover political and cultural divisions without resolving them.
Team and Institutional Legacy
The project brought together researchers working on memory studies, literature, religion, intellectual history and the political cultures of Central and Eastern Europe. Its team included Agata Domachowska, Łukasz Gemziak, Oleksandra Shtepenko, Paulina Maria Przybyszewska and Maria Woźniak.
One of the project’s most important outcomes has been the development of sustained scholarly collaboration rather than the production of isolated individual outputs. The article published by Łukasz Gemziak and Oleksandra Shtepenko in Scando-Slavica grew directly from their work on the Soviet and Ukrainian dimensions of the Millennium of the Baptism of Kyivan Rus’.
The collaboration also acquired a wider institutional significance after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Oleksandra Shtepenko first joined the research environment at Nicolaus Copernicus University through cooperation with the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund. She has subsequently joined NCU as an employed researcher.
Her trajectory illustrates an important dimension of academic solidarity. Supporting a scholar at risk should not end with temporary refuge. Wherever possible, it should create conditions for continued research, publication, institutional belonging and a sustainable academic career.