Eastern Orthodox Church – wine and Mickiewicz
For centuries, the community of the Eastern Orthodox Christianity in Poznań was rather small. The first Greeks, who were wine, tobacco and dried fruit and nuts traders, arrived in Poznań at the end of the 16th century. At first, they did not assimilate and integrate with the Poles. Over time, however, they assumed Polish surnames and even began to actively participate in Polish culture. This is shown well by the example of Jan Konstanty Żupański. In the 19th century he ran the biggest publishing company in Poznań, which printed the works by Kołłątaj, Mickiewicz and Kraszewski. Żupański’s ancestors funded the first Eastern Orthodox chapel in Poznań, located first in a tenement house in the Market Square and then at the nearby Nowa Street (today’s Paderewskiego Street).
The second significant group of the Eastern Orthodox Church’s believers came from the East. Already in 1778 Russian soldiers stationed in the city, along with the local Greek community, organised a grand procession to the Warta River to celebrate the Feast of Jordan, commemorating the baptism of Jesus Christ. After the First World War, another group of Russians and Ukrainians settled in Poznań. These were mostly tsarist officers who had been forced to leave Soviet Russia. In 1924 a small tserkov was built for them. The temple still exists today and a large part of its congregation comprises Ukrainians who have arrived in Poznań in recent years.
Jan Konstanty Żupański came from the family of Greek merchants, the Zupanos. He became one of the biggest publishers in the 19th-century Poznań. Photo from 1860, public domain
