1882–1972
Ivan Ohiienko (Metropolitan Ilarion)
Linguist, translator of the Bible
He spent nearly forty years translating the Bible into Ukrainian, and the full text came out only in 1962, in London. Linguist Ivan Ohiienko from Brusyliv was the first rector of the university in Kamianets-Podilskyi and a minister of the UNR, and in Canada became Metropolitan Ilarion.
Key accomplishments
- Linguist and historian of the Ukrainian language and church; among the first to lecture in Ukrainian at Kyiv University
- First rector of the Kamianets-Podilskyi Ukrainian State University (1918)
- Minister of education, then minister of religious affairs of the UNR (1919)
- Translated the whole Bible into Ukrainian: the New Testament appeared in 1939, the complete text in London in 1962
- Metropolitan of Winnipeg and head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada (from 1951)
A book forty years in the making
Imagine a job that takes most of your adult life. Ivan Ohiienko began translating the Bible into Ukrainian in the early 1920s. The Gospels came out in 1937 and the New Testament with the Psalms in 1939, and he finished most of the Old Testament in 1940. The war kept him from publishing it all, so the full text, some 1,500 pages, appeared only in 1962, in London.
A boy from Brusyliv
Ohiienko was born on 14 January 1882 to a peasant family in the small town of Brusyliv, now in Zhytomyr region. His father died early in an accident. Ivan trained at a military medical assistants’ school in Kyiv, passed the gymnasium exams as an external student and entered Kyiv University, where he studied Slavic philology and graduated in 1909. After the revolution of 1917 he was among the first to lecture at the university in Ukrainian.
Rector and minister
In 1918 the government of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi decided to found a Ukrainian university in Kamianets-Podilskyi, and Ohiienko became its first rector. In 1919 he served as minister of education of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR) and then as minister of religious affairs, pressing for church services to be held with Ukrainian pronunciation and for priests to be people who knew Ukrainian. He also wrote the script for the Unification celebration of 22 January 1919.
From Warsaw to Winnipeg
After the UNR’s defeat in 1920 Ohiienko settled in Poland. He taught in Lviv and Warsaw, and when he was removed from Warsaw University in 1932 he published the journal Ridna mova (“Native Language”). In 1940, by then a widower, he became a monk under the name Ilarion and was made bishop of Kholm; in 1944 he became a metropolitan. Fleeing the advancing Red Army, he went to Austria and then Switzerland, and in 1947, invited by a parish, moved to Winnipeg in Canada. In 1951 he was elected Metropolitan of Winnipeg and head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada.
Ohiienko died in Winnipeg on 29 March 1972.
Why it matters today
Ivan Ohiienko proved that Ukrainian can carry anything, from a university lecture to Scripture. His translation of the Bible is considered one of the best in Ukrainian, and it took him nearly forty years, through war and emigration. He believed that a people that does not work for its native language “will not soon become a conscious nation”, and he built that road himself: with a university, a ministry, a journal and a translation. He even asked that his archive go to Ukraine only once the country and its church were free. His life shows that great work for your own language can take decades, and is worth not giving up on.
