Ever since the Kievan period, literature, art, and architecture in Ukraine had been closely linked to religion.
It was from Byzantium that Kievan Rus' received Christianity, and the educated elite and the cultural forms they produced were for the most part inspired by and linked to the Orthodox church.
To be sure, there were some examples of secular cultural phenomena, such as the historical chronicles and the epic Lay of Ihor’s Campaign, but Rus' culture was cast largely in a religious mold during the Kievan period of Ukrainian history.This situation remained essentially unchanged during the Lithuanian-Polish era, which lasted from the fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth century in much of Ukrainian territory. Religion and elite culture were inseparable. Moreover, following the Byzantine tradition, church and state were always closely associated. Again, this was the continuation of a trend established in the Kievan period, when another characteristic evolved as well: the fusion of religious and territorialnational identity. One was of the Rus' land because one was of the Orthodox Rus' faith, and vice versa. Political and religious developments therefore were dependent upon each other. Such interdependence was of special significance when, during the two centuries between 1349 and 1569, most Ukrainian lands progressively came under the political, social, and cultural domination of Lithuania and Poland, countries whose governing and dominant social strata were Roman Catholic. In effect, the future of the Ukrainian people depended on the fate of its Orthodox Rus' church within a basically Roman Catholic environment.
The Metropolitanate of Kiev
Educated Ukrainians were well aware of the crucial symbiotic relationship of politics, religion, culture, and the survival of the Rus' as a people. The first two centuries of Lithuanian-Polish rule did not bode well for the Orthodox Rus' church in Ukraine. The reason was related in large part to the complicated status of the highest dignitary in the Orthodox church, the metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus'. As one of the aftereffects of the Mongol presence beginning in the 1240s, the metropolitans tended to reside not in their seat of Kiev, but rather in the north-