Rimestad, Sebastian. (2012) The Challenges of Modernity to the Orthodox Church in Estonia and Latvia (1917 - 1940). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. - 334 p. The history of the Orthodox Church in Estonia is of interest to many researchers. The Estonian case is unique in many respects: Orthodoxy became the religion of a significant minority of the local population in the middle of the 19th century as a result of a whole movement of conversion, which was voluntary and mostly economically motivated.1 In the 1920s, the Estonian Orthodox Church, seeking autocephaly, broke off relations with its Russian mother Church and in 1923 entered the canonical jurisdiction of the Ecumenical (Constantinople) Patriarchate. This change of jurisdiction is made later when- 1. For the history of this conversion movement in Estonia and Latvia, see: Gavrilin A.V. Essays on the history of the Riga Diocese. 19th century. Philokalia, 1999; Ryan, D.C. (2008) The Tsar's Faith: Conversion, Religious Politics, and Peasant Protest in Imperial Russia's Baltic Provinces, 1845 - 1870S (unpublished PhD thesis. University of California LA, 2008). page 345it led to a schism in the local church, first in 1942, and then again in 1993_1996. At present, the Orthodox Church in Estonia remains divided into two church organizations: one under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate and the other under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The history of the Orthodox Church in Latvia has been studied to a lesser extent 2. This case differs from the Estonian one: although there was a movement to convert to Orthodoxy on the territory of Latvia, in the 1920s the Latvian Church remained loyal to Moscow and transferred to the jurisdiction of Constantinople only in 1935 under pressure from the Latvian government. Despite the fact that in 1942 there was also a confrontation between supporters of the two patriarchates, attempts to recreate the two jurisdictions in the 1990s, after Latvia gained inde ... Read more