FROM a childhood spent in the Russian city of St Petersburg to studying architecture and later Anglo Saxon archaeololgy, it has been a long road to Barnard Castle for St Mary’s new curate.
Revd Dr Ana Moskvina was ordained as a priest at Durham Cathedral on June 30, and will spend the next three to four years learning the ropes from the town’s vicar Revd Canon Alec Harding.
Originally born into the Russian Orthodox faith, she was baptised at the Transfiguration Cathedral, in St Petersburg.
The 34-year-old said: “Apparently it was the same font that Vladmir Putin was baptised in, which I am not happy about.”
After studying architecture in Russia she came to England aged 21 partly because of politics and partly on the advice of her dad, Andrey.
Revd Moskvina said: “He was encouraging me to go abroad to be more appreciated in the academic world.
“He is an engineer but he has worked in the universities and he had seen it is not the greatest environment for flourishing or getting opportunities and being published, and growing further professionally.”
Initially she completed an undergraduate course in art history, along with gallery and museum studies, at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, planning a career in museums, but her interest in architecture continued.
She said: “I am not going to be a Norman Foster and build anything exciting, but I still have a passion for architecture.
“I carried on and most of my stuff was on church architecture of different kinds.”
It was through her interest in church groups (the siting of churches in particularly arrangements) that her interest in Anglo Saxon churches developed and she went on to complete a doctorate in the subject.
Although baptised, her family were not regular churchgoers, and it wasn’t until she went on a school art trip to an ancient monastery in the north of Russia that her faith was piqued.
The curate said: “The monastery was the first gulag camp, then it was restored to a monastery in the early 90s.
“The idea was to spend a few weeks there drawing, sketching and painting, but we would go to services and it was the first time I came properly to hear the liturgy,” she explained.
“We were in complete awe because of the singing and chanting.
“I loved that place so much I went back four times.”
While studying towards her doctorate, Revd Moskvina began attending St Peter Mancroft Church, in Norwich.
She said: “I started singing there and the vicar said to me ‘do you want a job?’, and that is how I became a verger.”
It was through attending church that she began to realise the difference between the Orthodox faith and the Anglican way.
She said: “The cathedral I went to in St Petersburg to light a candle and to pray had this big note that said you are not allowed to write the names of non-Orthodox people to pray for them and I was ‘half my family are Finnish and Lutheran’, so I would deliberately write their name. I thought Anglican was almost the same, but the first time I went, I was like, oh, I’m welcome here.
“There is that sense of being present and looking outward, and serving the community which I felt was very different to my experience of the Orthodox church.”
Although the vicar, Revd Ian Bently, encouraged her to be ordained it took her almost eight years to be convinced it was the path for her.
She said: “I am not one of those people who wakes up in the morning and hears God’s voice, so it took me a while to start to separate what might be from God and what might be my own feelings. Eventually I was affirmed and it did feel right.
“I went into this process with the idea that if, for any reason, I got it wrong and God doesn’t want me to do this, he will do something to redirect me.
“I do think there will be signs and things will be happening to push me in a different direction if that needs to happen, but it hasn’t happened yet and I got here. It feels almost like returning home, that is the feeling I have had the last week, so I am probably in the right place.”
