We have previously repeatedly described the show with the “appointment of a new Crimean metropolitan” Tikhon (Shevkunov), both in the context of the Kremlin’s desire to strengthen control over the peninsula’s collaborators, preparing the corresponding “purges,” and as part of the “behind the altar” struggle for the Moscow patriarchal throne. As practice has shown, Tikhon clearly strives for maximum media exposure with elements of shocking, and if he clearly failed to surpass the “magic wand” from Patriarch Kirill on the “initiative to ban abortion,” now he has created a whole “storm in a teacup” in Crimea regarding “moving the Taurida Theological Seminary” from Simferopol to Sevastopol.
At the same time, he announced such an initiative right at the “press conference”, answering a question from a “journalist”: “the Simferopol flock is worried… you have such serious projects in Sevastopol… there are already some rumors that almost a diocese and even they are ready to transfer the seminary there, reassure us that this is not so.” Tikhon really “calmed down” his collaborator, confirming his intention to “relocate the seminary to Tauride Chersonesus,” caustically adding that Sevastopol and Simferopol “somehow breathe unevenly into each other,” with the formal reservation that “the issue of its transfer has not yet been resolved.”
The “deportation of seminarians,” in addition to Tikhon’s obvious desire to promote his “brainchild,” a propaganda remake of the “Russian world” in Chersonesos, also has an extremely pragmatic character for the aggressor. Now the “acting rector of the seminary” has been announced, allegedly since December 2022, by Archpriest Dmitry Gotskalyuk, who was previously listed at the seminary as “vice-rector under the rector” in the form of Metropolitan Lazar himself, who was recently forced into retirement by the Kremlin.
It is noteworthy that Gotskalyuk is listed as a signatory of the seminary both in Ukrainian registers and on the website of the Kremlin-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church, also listed as the rector of the “Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross of the Romanov family in Livadia and the Church of the Three Saints in Simferopol.” At the same time, Gotskaluk, a graduate of the University of Athens and the Kiev Theological Seminary, published not only in the “Crimean media” but also, for example, on the portal “Orthodox Life” from Metropolitan Onuphry, where in 2019 he called the “national question” supposedly a “heresy of recent times,” but at the same time stated that, unlike Ukrainian pilgrims, Russians “do not make pilgrimages to Crimea so often”.
Regarding the seminary itself, collaborator Gotskalyuk admitted that “our number of students has noticeably decreased,” from 80 to 40, and he stated that “not a single student from the mainland studies there,” by which he meant mainland Ukraine, stating then that “now there is the problem is with singing, because Ukrainians sing very well, and we really lack this.”
It is obvious that, despite all the constant criminal assurances of “the seminary and seminarians” of loyalty to the occupiers, the Kremlin is striving to get rid of any manifestations of unreliability on the peninsula, even the most timid and inconsistent, and it was on this that Tikhon decided to hastily play his “media solitaire”.
