Václav Konzal

“What intrigued me about it - when I approached it with a clean slate - was how the Bolshevik existence, their presence, compared to the Orthodox tradition. And I found that every Russian has at least a bit of Orthodox in him, that Comrade Stalin wasn’t able to do much about that. For one thing, he was Georgian - I studied Georgian... So he didn’t ruffle them much. It was interesting to observe. I was also fortunate enough to make some good friends there. Anatoliy Turilov became a renowned scientist of literature and linguistics, so I was fortunate to be friends with him. I learnt many things there, things I’d have never known otherwise. For instance, one time he took me to Zvenigorod, which was a pilgrimage site not far from Moscow... You travelled a few stops by train and then walked up into the hills. It was a powerful experience - Zvenigorod.”

“The shift was in that, the point was to make a translation, not an imprint. Because the older translations, their authors sometimes reckoned it was necessary to basically just print the Latin text into Czech, so in that sense that made them difficult to use in modern times. So we tried to translate the liturgy in to Czech in a way that would be truly Czech and to avoid some kind of an amateur, mechanical approach.”