Food for every season, blessings and curses, and exorcising evil spirits are only some of the many folk traditions associated with Orthodoxy; they make up for what they lack in formal status with a more immediate presence in the lives of the faithful. Alongside other aspects of church life (theology, history, politics, liturgy, art, and music), they are part of the rich fabric of Orthodoxy in the world. We are excited to offer to our readers the current issue as we examine several folk traditions deeply embedded in our church culture.

Night was falling as we entered the church of the Annunciation in Gerakari, a lowland village a few kilometers outside Larissa, in Central Greece. The church is a late nineteenth-century building, with an old wooden ceiling and a rather simple iconostasis, but also with later additions, modern frescoes, a narthex with rabbeted wood and a brand-new stone-built shed on its south side...

When people get into involved conversations about religious food customs, I almost always think of my great-aunt. During World War II, she was evacuated from Kyiv and spent the war in a godforsaken village in a Muslim area of the Caucasus Mountains...

Everyone has their favorite foods. They form our physical and spiritual culture. If you are Norwegian, Italian, Russian, Korean, Greek, Senegalese, Ukrainian, or Brazilian, you have a favorite food from your place of origin...

In 2013-2014, against the backdrop of the Revolution of Dignity, Oleksiy Chekal, as a devout Christian and Ukrainian citizen, left the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) on moral grounds. This church supported the idea of a “Russian world” and did not listen to the suffering and essence of its people...

They are everywhere—from handbags to shoes, backsplashes to office cubicles, and even adorning celebrities like Priyanka Chopra. Eye-shaped pendants, or the nazar—a symbol comprised of a series of concentric circles in hues of blue and white found throughout Turkey and Greece—have inspired a multimillion-dollar lifestyle trend...

As a child of the 1970s, The Exorcist was the stuff of legend for my friends and me. Older siblings spoke of it in knowing whispers; I often—and unsuccessfully—pleaded my case to my parents, begging for permission to see the movie.

Sofika Zielyk, an artist who grew up and continues to live in the heart of Manhattan’s Ukrainian Village neighborhood, has been expressing her heritage through the art of pysanky eggs since childhood...

The subject of shared shrines and pilgrimages in the context of modern Western academia seems to have been most highlighted by a British archaeologist living at the turn of the last century and carrying on research at the British School in Athens...

If you are waiting for a thoughtful Orthodox perspective on modern love, Waiting and Dating will leave you still waiting...