18 Facts About Old Believers

In doing so, according to the Old Believers, Nikon acted without adequate consultation with the clergy and without gathering a council.

Old Believers urged Nikon to use discretion in attempting to enforce complete uniformity with Greek practice.

The Old Believers fiercely rejected all innovations, and the most radical among them maintained that the official Church had fallen into the hands of the Antichrist.

The State had the most active Old Believers arrested, and executed several of them some years later in 1682.

Many Old Believers fled Russia altogether, particularly for the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where the community exists to this day.

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Old Believers became the dominant denomination in many regions, including the Pomors of the Russian Far North, in the Kursk region, in the Ural Mountains, in Siberia, and the Russian Far East.

The Old Believers gained the right to build churches, to ring church bells, to hold processions and to organize themselves.

One can regard the Act of 1905 as emancipating the Old Believers, who had until then occupied an almost illegal position in Russian society.

Nevertheless, some restrictions for Old Believers continued: for example, they were forbidden from joining the civil service.

Since none of the bishops joined the Old Believers, apostolically ordained priests of the old rite would have soon become extinct.

Nevertheless, the Old Believers sought above all to defend and preserve the purity of the Orthodox faith, embodied in the old rituals, which inspired many to strive against Patriarch Nikon's church reforms even unto death.

Old Believers were accused of not being able to distinguish the important from the unimportant.

Old Believers hold that the preservation of a certain "microclimate" that enables the salvation of one's soul requires not only living by the commandments of Christ, but carefully preserving Church tradition, which contains the spiritual power and knowledge of past centuries, embodied in external forms.

Old Believers reject the idea of contents a priori prevailing over form.

Some Old Believers consider any pre-Nikonite Orthodox Russian practice or artifact as exclusively theirs, denying that the Russian Orthodox Church has any claims upon a history before Patriarch Nikon.

Some Old Believers are still transient throughout various parts of the world today.

Lipovans, who live in Romania's Danube Delta, are descendants of the Old Believers who left Russia in around 1740 to avoid religious persecutions.

Old Believers arrived in Alaska, US, in the second half of the 20th century, helping to revive a shrinking Orthodox population.