Ukrainian Orthodox worshipers flock to Palm Sunday in Lviv

This was Palm Sunday for those churches. Outside of the garrison church on the cobblestone street, worshipers lined up to buy bouquets of pussy willow and boxwood branches tied with ribbons in the colors of the Ukrainian flag, yellow and blue, being sold to support the armed forces. Instead of palm fronds, which are used in other places to commemorate Jesus entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, Ukrainians use pussy willow, a harbinger of spring.

On Saturday, Lviv's flower market was crowded with women selling pussy willow branches wrapped in twine with spring flowers, berries and greenery. Ukrainians take them to church to be blessed and then take them home to display long after Easter.

Lviv has more than 100 churches, some of which are located in the historic centre of the city, which is listed by UNESCO as a world heritage site. The city in western Ukraine was spared much of the destruction of churches, although not their closure, by atheist Soviet authorities who ruled the country until the collapse of the U.S. S.R. The number of Christians in Ukraine was more than a thousand years old, and today 85 percent of Ukrainians are Christian, the majority of them Eastern Orthodox. The war has split the Orthodox churches in Russia and Ukraine, with Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, expressing support for it.

On Sunday, at Saint Michael's Golden Domed Cathedral in Kyiv and All Ukraine, Metropolitan Epiphanius said in a sermon that the country's enemies from the north had turned the Russian Orthodox Church into an instrument of lies, enslavement, murder and all other evil.