Germany gives back to Ukraine Peter I's Charter on Annexation of Ukrainian Church

The historical royal charter on the enthronement of a metropolitan to the Kyivan Metropolis was taken from Kyiv during the Second World War. This document is an important testimony to the history of annexation of the Ukrainian Church by Moscow.

The historic charter of Peter I, which was kept at the University of Tübingen since the late 1950s, was returned to Ukraine on Thursday, March 14, the university told DW.

The document was stored at the Library of the Institute of East European History and Geography at the University of Tübingen in the federal state Baden-Württemberg. The German-Ukrainian research group found out that this important document for the history of the Church of Ukraine was probably taken from Kyiv in 1941 during the Second World War as a military trophy.

In view of this, the Minister of Science and Culture of Baden-Württemberg, Theresia Bauer, with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Germany and the University, initiated the return of the historical royal charter to Ukraine.

The document was passed to Ambassador of Ukraine to Germany Andriy Melnyk. “I am grateful to the researchers from Tübingen and Ukraine for their important work and their conclusions about how the king's letter came to the University of Tübingen. The fact that we can now return this symbolic and extremely important document to Ukraine, forcefully exported to Germany, is also a sign that our country understands its historical responsibility,” Bauer said.

The royal charter is an important document of church history. This is the confirmatory letter of the Russian emperor Peter I of 1708 to Metropolitan Joasaph Krokovsky about his enthronement to the Kyivan See.

Joasaph was the last metropolitan during the time of Kyiv being part of the Russian Empire, who was freely elected by the Kyivan clergy and approved by the tsar, and not directly appointed by Moscow.