Staroobrzędowcy na białoruskich ziemiach Rzeczypospolitej Obojga Narodów w XVII-XVIII stuleciu
Old Ritualists in the Belarusian lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 17th-18th centuries

Summary/Abstract: In the second half of the 17th century in the Kiev-Moscow Orthodoxy, after the reform of the Patriarch of Moscow Nikon (1652-1658), a religious group called Old Believers or Old Ritualists emerged. Because of persecution the small and little-known community of dissenters fled across the Urals and the ocean, but also to the territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569-1772 / 1795), where religious tolerance prevailed. Old Believers from the areas of Pskov and Novgorod settled in the region of today’s Augustów, Suwałki and Sejny. The article is devoted to the history of the emergence of the seventeenth-century split or schism in Orthodoxy, the stages of resettlement of Old Believers to the Belarusian lands and attempts to adapt Old Believers to new cultural and religious realities.

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