Living in the End Times : Ritual, History, and Ethics in Romania's Old Belief

In the Danube Delta, on the border between Romania and Ukraine, a shrinking community of Russian Old Believers - Orthodox Christians who rejected seventeenth-century religious reforms in Russia - has struggled for survival, withdrawn from the world while simultaneously trying to engage with it. Waves of social change, from internal divisions and migration�to external secularization and modernization, have reinforced this community's commitment to the old Orthodox rites and customs, as well as their long-standing conviction that the end times are imminent. Living in the End Times offers an in-depth ethnographic and historical exploration of the�persistence of this community in contemporary Romania. Vlad Naumescu examines their�ways of making history, pursuing continuity, and inscribing their historical experience into a�narrative of radical hope.�The interwoven life stories of the Old Believers challenge broader�dichotomies�of the secular and the religious, socialist and post-socialist, and continuity and�rupture, revealing a community whose obligation to bear the past�sanctifies the present and gives scope to the future.�Against�the threats of spiritual doubt, ritual failure, and lacking priesthood that have defined�centuries of religious crisis,�Old Belief has already provided its adherents the means�to turn rupture into continuity, loss into creative transformation, and endings into�beginnings. �Living in the End Times reveals how the most orthodox of Eastern Christians became modern by staying true to their faith, inviting us to�reconsider the nature of orthodoxy, historicity and modernity.