Sanctuary: The Spiritual Heritage Documentation Project (Planning Conference)

This year the program initiated Sanctuary: The Spiritual Heritage Documentation Project. A planning conference was held on 26 January 2008, and the materials are available on the CIUS Religion and Culture website: http://www.ualberta.ca/cius/religion-culture/c-sanctuaryworkshop.htm. The planning conference established the basic parameters of the project: digitizing, as comprehensively as possible, existing records, such as old photographs, paintings, and videos, whether in church, public, or individual possession, for a central digital record to be housed at the University of Alberta; systematically and comprehensively documenting anew all churches (exterior and interior), paintings, carvings, church vessels, furnishings, banners, vestments, bell towers, cemeteries, tombstones, and chapels in the Ukrainian prairie settlements, including making virtual reality movies; digitizing all historic recordings of church music from the parishes and videorecording liturgical services; interviewing on site (priest, caretaker, parishioners) and interviewing artists and architects who worked on the churches; linking the collected materials in a searchable database(s); making most of the material available to the public and to scholars worldwide on the Internet; presenting the results of our studies in the parish communities as lectures and in printed form; also presenting the results at learned conferences and meetings of professional associations (such as the Alberta Museums Association, the Folklore Studies Association of Canada, the Canadian Association of Slavists, and the Canadian Historical Association).  This project is timely in two ways. First, it is a response to a crisis. The Ukrainian churches and related monuments in prairie communities are under threat. Many churches are being vandalized, falling into disrepair, or even collapsing. Small and aging congregations are unable to provide the security and maintenance necessary to preserve physical structures. To obtain a record of the sacral marks that Ukrainians made on the prairies, it is necessary to act within this coming decade. Second, the project is a response to an opportunity. We now have a kind of technology that allows us to make many thousands of photographs at low cost, store them in a small space, integrate them in searchable databases, and diffuse them globally. It is envisioned that Sanctuary will bring grantees from Ukraine to Canada to contribute to the project and gain experience from it. The program is applying for grants in order to fund the project.

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