With the blessing of Metropolitan Benjamin of Minsk and Zaslavl, the annual All-Belarussian Cross procession “Zhirovichi-Minsk” took place again on August 18–26, 2024. In anticipation of this massive event, we publish the diary of a journalist Olga Demidyuk who walked two hundred and fifty kilometers with the pilgrims in 2023.
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Nine days of walking, praying and venerating the shrines from the Holy Dormition Zhirovichy monastery to the Minsk Holy Spirit Cathedral. It amounts to two hundred and fifty kilometer, with the route passing through four dioceses and visiting eighteen churches.
Calluses, pain, fatigue, heat, and rain—everyone will face these factors if they decide to walk in a Cross procession. But why do people decide to join? For the sake of what do they abandon their homes and give up coziness and comfort? A journalist who writes for the website belonging to the St. Elizabeth Convent in Minsk walked in the procession for four days to answer these questions for herself.
Cross procession. Evening one
We arrive in the village of Naliboki to join the All-Belarusian procession. In the year of the 850th anniversary of the repose of St. Euphrosyne of Polotsk, with the blessing of Metropolitan Benjamin of Minsk and Zaslavl, Patriarchal Exarch of All Belarus, the Cross procession takes place from August 18 to 26.
Today is the fifth day of the journey out of nine. The participants began walking at 6:30 am and had to walk thirty-nine kilometers. It’s already 8 p.m. but they haven’t arrived here yet. Festively dressed locals are waiting for them near the church: men are wearing shirts and women are wrapped in white shawls. The sun is already beginning to set and the sky is clothed with soft clouds.
If you made up your mind to join a procession, God will help you in everything, even in such “minute things” as transportation
My traveling companion Alina and I were driven here by Sergey, a parishioner at the St. Elizabeth Convent. Alina’s mother is walking in the procession since the day one but her daughter will join it along with me. Alina says that she was trying, and failing, to order a shuttle bus all day long and wasn’t sure till the last moment how she’d get there. She prayed, “Mother of God, help me to get there!” and then her mother found out that a car from Minsk was coming to meet the procession today. So, everything was miraculously resolved. In general, people would keep telling me the same kinds of stories over and over again: if you made up your mind to walk in a Cross procession, God will help you in everything, even in such “minute things” as transportation.
Alina tells me that last year she walked the entire route of the procession and that she had a day when she realized, that that’s all, she can’t go any further. It’s too hot, too hard, and she was dying to have a shower. Many people even had a fever on that day. Her cousin went with the procession driving a car, giving rides to those who had difficulty walking. He decided to walk a part of the path himself and offered Alina to take his car and drives home. But once she got behind the wheel, the car broke down. And then they had a pit stop by the river. Everyone took a swim and it got easier.
“If it gets too hard, you venerate the icons and the reliquary, you just for strength, as if you were a child,” Alina tells me.
The Cross procession is accompanied by an ambulance and the cars that deliver the belongings of the participants, a car carrying water, and cars that offer rides to those who have difficulty walking. As we are waiting, several of these women are driven to the church. One of them, Alla, shares her impressions:
“When my legs hurt and I have no strength, the Lord gives strength. You barely feel the last kilometers before the stop. When a prayer service is over, you walk like a duck, as everything hurts so much. You sleep during the night, then get up and keep on walking. And you find the strength!”
The procession is a truly powerful thing. Last year, one woman was going to walk for just one day. She only took a mat, a sleeping bag and nothing else with her. She had bad eyesight, so she walked in her glasses. She walked through the first day and went to sleep in a sleeping bag out in the open field (she couldn’t stand the stuffiness and snoring inside the school building where everyone else was sleeping). And you know, as the result, she made it to the very end! She asked Matushka the Queen of Heaven to give her strength. During a daytime stopover in one village that lasted two hours, this woman knocked at the first house she encountered asking to wash her clothes. An elderly man opened the door: he prepared a bath for her, so she washed herself and her clothes, put them on and they dried on her. And that’s how she walked for the rest of the day.
“People say that Matushka the Queen of Heaven will prepare a gift to anyone who walks in a procession,” Alla continues. “This woman wrote later that two weeks following the procession, something happened to her eyesight—her eyesight grew worse when she had her glasses on. She went to the doctor and was told that her eyesight was excellent. Nowadays, she can walk without glasses.”
Alla says that last year, when she heard about the procession, her heart lit up, but then she had doubts whether she could ever make it; after all, she was older and her health wasn’t great. So she asked for the blessing from the Queen of Heaven and Jesus Christ. She also warns that during the procession one may encounter temptations—someone would have trouble at home requiring one to leave the procession and go home, while for others, their illnesses become worse. But if you pray and rely on the will of God, everything will be resolved. For example, one woman was walking in the procession, but her mother became ill and she had to go home. She didn’t want to, but she had to come to terms with it. Alla says:
“It so happens in life that when we want something really badly, it never happens, but when we humble oursevles, in others words, we say—it’s all right, the Lord immediately bestows us with a gift. So, when that woman was about to leave, her mother called saying that something happened at night, so she sweated heavily and woke up feeling no pain. So, that woman kept on walking.”
The main thing you have to do is to pray all the way. If you don’t pray, you will get distracted and start to feel sorry for yourself. If it is too hard for you, try to walk behind the procession’s main icon and it will sort of “carry” you in prayer.
The procession is about a struggle with yourself. Last year, I heard from many people that during the procession you can hear unpleasant words and rudeness from people. Passions show their ugly face and it calls us to repentance. So, what is the conclusion? Once you’ve gone with the procession, you undergo a certain change, and you get at least a centimeter closer to God.
A car, a part of the procession, arrives at the church and the loudspeaker announces that the procession has already reached the village and everyone is invited to greet the participants. “Christ Is Risen!” that’s how we customarily greet them!” explains a male voice from the loudspeaker.
Alina and I, and our “driver” Sergey, decided to go to meet the procession. We walk along the village road and we see the villagers, the children and the dogs, standing by their houses and looking into the distance. All three of us are walking while reciting the Jesus Prayer. Soon we see the first rows of the pilgrims, their banners and icons. Men are walking at the head of the procession, followed by the women. They take turns reciting the Jesus Prayer. The brother’s voice is so powerful and loud, as if the words slice the air apart in front of them and pave the way, while the voice of the sisters—clear and gentle—is trailing behind.
We gradually draw closer to each other, and our prayer, small and thin as a stream, is about to become one with the river of their voices. I stammer, and tears well up—I cannot explain why. I only feel an other-worldly joy that I can’t hold in my heart. I turn to Alina with a silent question in my eyes, “What’s going on? Why are the tears flowing?” and I see her crying, too.
We realize that we are walking towards a force whose power we can’t explain as yet. For the next three days, I will try to decipher what this force was about.
Two weeks prior the Cross procession
“It’s a great journey. It’s not easy, but it’s great. Come with me!” Nadia writes to me. She walked the Cross procession last year and calls me to walk with her this year. I refuse. It is an impossible feat for me, because I am neither a hiker, nor an athlete. My heart does not miss a beat when I her her appeal. I also don’t want to part with my comfort and to have little sleep, walk for miles, in the heat and in the cold. I want to keep doing what I am doing now: reading Nadia’s messages, sitting in a cafe and drinking an espresso tonic. And I don’t have an answer ready as to why I should go there to suffer.
“The Cross procession is a special event. I think you can’t regret doing something like this. For me, it was as if my life imploded there and I was a full-strength version of myself: in a week, I had so many events that would normally occur with me in a year,” Nadia continues to persuade me.
I promise that I’ll think it over and immediately decide that I can’t go all the way to the end. When I give her a timid consent to part of a journey, thinking, “If I don’t like it and it is too hard, I’ll go home,” Nadia sends me a list of necessary things containing forty two items. Among them are a tent, a mat, a prayer book, a raincoat, etc.
I decide that I will go for four days; it is a hundred kilometers out of two hundred fifty, but even this distance seems impossible to me. Usually after standing through the church service, my feet are aching all day, but if I walk, I can make about ten kilometers a day. Besides, a couple of days before my scheduled outing, I got sick, and I was so sick that I couldn’t get up for three days. I couldn’t understand how I was going to go being so sick, so I seriously considered canceling the whole thing. But I had a feeling inside that if I cancel everything, I would miss something important. It helped me to crawl to church and have communion.
It took me two days to pack everything. A friend of mine let me use her backpack and a sleeping bag. Nadia invited me to spend the night in her tent and everything was quickly resolved with transportation.
So, I was ready to go and already arrived in Minsk, from where I was supposed to get a ride to the route, when suddenly I received a message that cut the ground from under my feet. I had only one wish—to cancel everything, go home and cry… But I also realized that if there was anything that could heal me now, it’s exactly a road trip, a prayer, and God....
Night one
Mats are spread out on the floor in a school hallway, sleeping bags are lying on top of the mats, and backpacks full of stuff are standing next to them. Before pilgrims go to bed, they treat their feet with brilliant green and put bandages over their blisters. Tonight, Nadia is staying with some fellow parishioners, so I decided not to pitch a tent. I am lying on a hard floor in my sleeping bag and think about where I’ve ended up. Why should I lacerate my feet? Why should I suffer like this? The room is stuffy, someone is snoring, another one is coughing, and so I can’t sleep. I step outside and walk towards the school stadium standing empty. I stop and look up at the starry sky.
I realized that here, so far away from home, where I experience obvious discomfort and face hardships, is the place where I want to experience closeness to God
As I was sitting on the porch of my countryside house, pondering whether to go or not, I was thinking that the most important thing for me right now is to understand why I should go. Because it is a non-mandatory labor. You can just attend church, pray, participate in the Sacraments—and that’s enough for you. What’s the meaning of the Cross procession personally for me? I knew that I didn’t join it so that God could fulfill some of my wishes. And most likely not because I could pray for others—I am too weak for that. And then I remembered that, after becoming a churchgoer, I decided to go and labor at a monastery for a week, and how I often mentally returned to that experience thinking that these days I wouldn’t have the heart to repeat that. The way my life goes, its comforts, and busy schedule keep my feet firmly on the earth, and it becomes more and more difficult for me to feel and see the sky, to hear God’s will for me in the beating of my heart. That’s when I realized that it is here, far away from home, with all obvious discomforts and hardships, that I want to feel closeness to God. Once I voiced this thought for myself, my heart resounded with joy and then—a star fell from the sky. It was so bright and astonishing that I realized that God would give me a helping hand.
And here I am, looking at the starry sky at a school stadium in the Naliboki village, kneeling down and asking God to help me walk my hundred kilometers.
When I returned to school, I saw a girl running in leaps and bounds, shouting loudly and joyfully: “Daddy, Daddy, we need to walk to the end! I was told that for anyone who walks to the end the Mother of God will prepare a gift!”
I suddenly feel like this girl, who is also dying to receive her gift. But she also doesn’t dare hope for it…
Day one
In the school where we spent the night, the echo is thick and it amplifies every rustle and every word. This is the night when I won’t be able to sleep at all. We get up at 4 a.m. We gather our belongings and then walking to church for Divine Liturgy that begins at 4:40. Today we face twenty-six kilometers ahead. It’s my first day of the journey. And the sixth for the rest of the pilgrims. After the first days of hot weather and an average walk of thirty kilometers a day, this day is considered an easy one.
All participants have the blessing to take communion every day. The priest at church says that only those who have just arrived or who committed mortal sins must have a confession. If you faithfully prayed the Jesus Prayer during the day, you don’t need to read the prayer rule before Communion. “But if you walked and all you did was talk, then it is not a procession, but simply a careless walk with icons,” the batiushka adds emphatically.
After a sleepless night, I have difficulty understanding what’s going on. I walk from school to church as if in a fog. But after Communion I feel a surge of energy, as if I hadn’t spend the night lying on a bare floor. If you ask anyone here how they hold on, they will tell you, “I hold on, but with God’s help. I can’t do it on my own.” Today I begin to understand that it is pointless here to rely on yourself—only on God.
“Pies from paradise, straight from heaven!” It is brother Sergey who distributes tea and pies at the church. Along the entire route of the procession, he delivers snacks at midday rest break. They are invariably heavenly—they could be dates, nuts or dried fruit. That’s where he got his nickname, Sergey from Paradise. “God has inexhaustible reserves,” he often repeats.
Sergey walks behind the procession, usually offering help to those who have difficulty walking, and he literally “carries their infirmities” himself. He (literally) carries things lost on our midday breaks. When the march begins, he walks along the procession and searches for their owners. In other words, he walks a lot more than the rest of us.
Brother Andrey is in charge of the water. They call him Andrey the water boy. He carries a bottle of water and a cup offering a drink on the go. And he asks at this: “How are you, sister?”, ‘How are you, dear?’ When it is hard and hot to walk, his compassion, kind gaze and a couple of sips of water feel like a luxury and a gift.
Traditionally, all those who join the procession later, kneel in front of it—so that the relics are carried over them. Then they join the procession.
And here we go. When the sisters are singing, several people conduct with a twig. Prayer helps to keep the rhythm going. I also realize that prayer is the only thing that keeps me afloat right now. And as soon as I get distracted, the news that “rushed in” the day before drags me back to sadness and self-pity. But when I return to a communal prayer, I slowly rise to the light. That’s when I realize that these days my only hope is holding on to this twig. Like someone who is drowning in the swamp and holds on to the hand of a rescuer. So, my task for now is really simple—I will grasp it with all my might, keep walking, and carry the name of Christ in my heart.
“Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.” It seems like it’s been a long time since I have spoken these words so sincerely and from the depths of my soul, feeling how I need His mercy, comfort, and protection. How I need God. And that He alone can help me.
“What, you went again?!”
On the first day of my journey, I meet Anna from my town. Last year, she had walked the entire route of the procession. I knew how hard it was for her and that she had to have treatment for her legs for six months afterward. How she decided to walk again, I have no idea.
For me, the Cross procession is repentance
“Last year, I had an inflamed foot muscle from straining,” she says. “So, if I go to the doctor now, he will tell me: “What, you went again?!” For me, the procession is repentance. I hesitated this year, whether I should go or not. It’s just because I already know what it is, and I was scared whether I would make it or not because of my knee. Plus, my age. But a relative got sick and I realized that I had to go and pray for him. The third day was really hard; we walked in a heatwave and on those two days we had to make thirty-six and thirty-nine kilometers each. I wanted to quit walking on those days. I asked who was going to Kobrin, but there was no car. I realized that I had to keep on going. But now that the most difficult days are over, I realize that I will crawl to the end of it.”
Liudmila, who supports Anna under her arm and walks beside, her says that processions bring much fruit, both spiritual and worldly. She tells how one woman wrote a review after the Velikoretsky Cross procession. She prayed hard to find a husband, and within a year she found a husband, got pregnant and the following year she went pregnant on the procession to offer her thanks.
Anna advises me to remember the names of my loved ones while I am walking. I sing aloud with sisters-in-the-faith, but when brothers-in-the-faith are singing, I pray about my family. I have just enough time to say all the names. My mind gets distracted at first, but I realize that this is my battlefield for now. I go either with God or with myself. And every idle thought or word steals my prayer.
