EDMONTON, Alberta – Sanctuary: the Spiritual Heritage Documentation Project has now documented nearly 600 endangered Ukrainian churches and their contents on the Canadian prairies.
Dr. Natalie Kononenko, professor of modern languages and cultural studies and Kule Chair of Ukrainian Ethnography at the University of Alberta, and her team spent the month of June 2015 in eastern and southeastern Saskatchewan doing fieldwork. Their itinerary included over 40 churches, and they interviewed families of leading icon painters.
Since returning to Edmonton, the team has been working on the digital asset management system that will house the audio-visual materials at the University of Alberta Library’s Peel’s Prairie Provinces collection. Prof. Kononenko showcased a demo of the system’s visual media component as part of her Sanctuary presentation in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, earlier this year.
A sound file system component is under development, with all the audio records from 2015 already indexed. The index employs the International Ethnographic Thesaurus for knowledge organization, which Prof. Kononenko hopes to amend by developing a set of Slavic categories that the thesaurus currently lacks.
The Sanctuary Project has been working since 2009 across the Canadian prairies; its aim is to photograph churches and their contents before they disappear due to demographic changes. The team also conducts research about ritual practice.
The Sanctuary Project is affiliated with the Research Program on Religion and Culture at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) and has benefitted from its support.