Ihor Isichenko
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Ihor Isichenko (Ukrainian: Ігор Ісіченко; from his birth name Yuriy Anriyovych Isichenko, Юрій Андрійович Ісіченко; born 28 January 1956 in Bashkir ASSR), is a Ukrainian religious and public figure, former Ukraine Orthodox archbishop, who converted to Catholicism in 2020. Isichenko played a key role in the revival and development of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church during its critical period in the mid-1990s. Since 2018, he has been a member of PEN Ukraine.
Ihor Isichenko was born in 1956 to a family of a construction laborer in the Bashkir ASSR, Russian SFSR. The same year, his family moved back to Ukraine, the city of Balakliya, near Kharkiv. In 1979, Isichenko graduated from the Kharkiv State University of Maksim Gorkiy, specializing in Ukrainian language and literature. Since 1981, he has been a lecturer at the Kharkiv National University at the university's department of the history of Ukrainian literature. At the Shevchenko Institute of Literature (Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR) in 1987, Isichenko defended his dissertation titled as the Kyiv Caves Patericon in the literary process of the late 16th and early 18th centuries in Ukraine. In 1990, it was published by Naukova Dumka.
Ihor Isichenko was Archbishop of the Diocese of Kharkiv - Poltava (north-eastern Ukraine) between 1993 and 2020, of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.[1] He is professor emeritus at the National University of Kharkiv, specialist in medieval literature and in relations between Catholics and Orthodoxes.[2]
In 2020, Isichenko converted to Catholicism and joined, together with 3 parishes of his former diocese, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.[3]
In 2022, he retired with the title of Archbishop Emeritus,[4] and went to work within the Ukrainian Catholic University.[5] He was made an honorary doctor of this university on 9 July 2022.[6]
Awards
- Order "For Intellectual Courage" (2008)