Halloween was not celebrated in the Orthodox Church of Ukraine temples. In the original video, the choir performs the church song How Beautiful is Your Temple, Mother of God, and not the song dedicated to evil spirits holiday. In addition, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church publicly condemns any celebration of Halloween.
Kremlin media and social mesia users began to spread fake information that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church temples allegedly celebrated the unholy holiday of Halloween. The proof of such an event is a short video showing a church choir performing a song dedicated to this day. The description of the video says that it was allegedly filmed in the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Lutsk.
“Ukrainian churches now celebrate Halloween and sing about Satan… What a shame, they sold the country to the devil. All cultural values are lost,” users write.
After the spread of such information, StopFake decided to check whether the temples really celebrated Halloween. As it turned out, this information is not true.
Firstly, the video distributed by propaganda was not filmed in Lutsk. Using a reverse image search on Google, we discovered that an identical video was posted on the Facebook page of the Lviv Church of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin as early as October 8. That is, long before Halloween. In addition, this church belongs to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, not the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, as propaganda claims.
The fact that it is the same video can be proven by taking an identical freeze frame. It shows the same choir members and the same position of the conductor’s hands.
Secondly, the choir does not perform a song dedicated to Halloween at all. If you listen to the original video, you can hear that they perform the church song How Beautiful is Your Temple, Mother of God, which has nothing to do with Halloween.
Thirdly, the celebration of Halloween in Ukrainian churches is made impossible by the fact that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church publicly opposes this holiday. On the eve of Halloween, an explanation about this was published on the official Facebook page of Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
Apparently, someone simply overlaid the original video with the Halloween song audio and a false description, and social media and agitprop users passed it off as true information. Then this fake began to be seriously discussed as a real event on pro-Kremlin YouTube channels.
Earlier, StopFake refuted the information that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church canonized Stepan Bandera.
