“In the Places of our Ancestors”

An Interview With the Founder of Orthodox Tours

For nearly three decades, V. Rev. Ilya Gotlinsky has been taking Americans on trips to sacred sites overseas through his organization Orthodox Tours. He has led groups to the Holy Land, Greece, Turkey, Russia, and the Balkans—but has also branched out beyond predominantly Orthodox countries to tour Italy, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, among other destinations. Hundreds of parishioners have benefited from his ministry.

Fr. Ilya is a native of Riga, Latvia, but has been part of the Diocese of New York and New Jersey since he was ordained by His Eminence Archbishop Peter in 1998. He has served at St. Stephen Serbian Orthodox Church, near Buffalo, and at the Dormition of the Virgin Mary Orthodox Church and St. Athanasius Chapel, both in Binghamton. He spoke with Jacob’s Well about the ways travel can contribute to spiritual and intellectual development, and about some of the challenges he faces in taking groups to wartorn and politically polarized countries.

For more information about Orthodox Tours, or to join an upcoming pilgrimage, visit orthodoxtours.com or email tours@orthodoxtours.com.

JW: Tell me a little bit about how Orthodox Tours got its start. 

Fr. Ilya: I started doing trips as if by accident. I never planned on it, but back in the 1990s, not long after the Soviet Union collapsed, my parishioners at St. Stephen’s Serbian Orthodox Church asked me to lead my first trip to Russia. I thought it was a very interesting challenge. That same year, I was transferred to my second parish in Binghamton, New York. I had already planned the trip, and my new parishioners said, Well, it's too late for us to join now. How about if we travel with you on the same route next year? And that way I had two trips to Russia, one year after the other. 

The third year came as if automatically after that, because there were enough people who heard but who were not able to travel during the first two years. Then people from those groups said, Well, it seems like you're doing a fair job. How about going somewhere else? And then we went to the Holy Land. And it started to snowball from there. 

JW: How has Orthodox Tours evolved since then? What do tours look like now? And how do you spread the word?

Fr. Ilya: Early on, I started a website, and on occasion I advertise at various church fairs and via Ancient Faith Radio. For the most part, it remains through word of mouth, and I have a core group of people who travel with me repeatedly. Of course, new people gradually began joining in, such as my former classmates from St. Vladimir’s and friends in different dioceses and even in different denominations. I now have highly trained people with religious backgrounds who help me lead the tours, and some priests help me on occasion as well.

I look at the trips as educational experiences. I make it clear that these are introductions, first and foremost, to the history of the Church and to the art and holy sites of our faith. However, I also look at it as a religious ministry. The Lord rewards me with participants who give me ideas about where to take them. Most recently, we’ve travelled to England and Rome, respectively, with the theme of early Christianity in the West, especially since we have a great number of converts of non-Eastern European or Balkan or Middle Eastern background, and I want to discover that part of Church history with them.

JW: Do you often get participants who are still looking into Orthodoxy, or who are not Orthodox at all but are interested from an educational standpoint? 

Fr. Ilya: Yes, in fact, I have led many tours where most participants were non-Orthodox. There are some people who are inquirers into the faith. I'm very blessed to say that there were some people who converted because of the experience on the trips—for whom it may have been a last push, or who just got very curious. Especially people who are involved in the history of sacred art. 

But there are also people who have no intention of converting, and they travel to a destination for a variety of reasons. I’ve had several people, either Protestants or Catholics, who, in the beginning, were sort of hesitant even to approach me, thinking that I exclusively work with my co-religionists. But finally, they did come along, and we have become friends with many of them. They're very appreciative, because in destinations where Catholicism or Protestantism remains a majority, they find for themselves something very special, something in their own history that they never heard about. 

JW: This seems to be an interdisciplinary endeavor— architecture meets art history and Church history and politics— but is there any one aspect you find yourself most called to? 

Fr. Ilya: I love challenges. I love going to new places. When I'm going on the same exact tour again and again, I always try to incorporate something new. Orthodox Tours has become an intellectual outlet for me because due to various unfortunate circumstances, I was never able to pursue my academic career and achieve a higher educational degree. It is an outlet because for every trip I'm preparing, studying, and lecturing to coherently answer people's questions. At times, I have needed to substitute or help the guide, and that has required preparation.

There are also many sites in Europe and the Middle East, like holy places or pilgrimage sites, that have been forgotten by the public. If you specialize in a particular history, of course you’d know about them. But bringing them to the public is a wonderful, wonderful challenge. So a little bit like people in the Age of Discovery, I love to go out and to find those places and to find people who inhabit those holy places.

JW: There's something you said in your response there that struck me; that is, that the trips may serve a kind of personal discovery for people, but the fact is that these places exist—they’re here. And the people who live in them are here. How have you developed connections with local guides in each of these various destinations?

Fr. Ilya: Through experience, through time. Nothing happened overnight. And, of course, the best guides with whom I work are not even professional guides. They're either clergy or laymen who got involved in the sphere of commercial interest. So these are people who need to tell exactly the same story time and again to the crowds that go there just to look at funny things and try some goofy foods, to quote Homer Simpson. When visitors are very much interested in the history, and especially if those visitors are religious, the guides become instant friends, because those are the people with whom we breathe exactly the same spirit and exactly the same air. 

In fact, I met my closest friend and my closest colleague in Serbia while doing many tours with him. My wife and I became so close with him that he became a Godfather to my younger daughter. So it's not only that he is a great man, but I appreciate him so much that, in the absence of a blood tie, and to have a spiritual tie, I invited him to become the Godfather, and he flew to the United States to hold my daughter during her baptism.

JW: It’s almost impossible to extricate the current political circumstances of some of the sites you visit—say, in Turkey, Russia in recent years, certainly Israel and Palestine—from the experience of a religious pilgrimage. How do you address this tension?

Fr. Ilya: Well, first, I want to address an issue that you didn't necessarily vocalize, but needs to be vocalized, and that’s safety. I don't do anything with my people that I wouldn't do with my family. In other words, I'm not doing anything crazy, and we're not going into any area where there is known danger. Second, knowing that people may have different opinions, we try to present facts. My mission is to bring people to the religious sites, and I try to avoid any kind of religious polemics, because I'm focusing on something else. I'm focusing on preaching Christ and the Church—but sometimes discussing a place’s political circumstances is an unavoidable topic. 

Even before the war started, I was saying to my travelers to Russia that some political tendencies in the country and some moves in the Church are not particularly in line with the Gospel, and some of my sentiments were not appreciated. But I felt that it was my duty to say it, because, after all, whenever you're going anywhere, it's not only about Orthodox Disney World, but also about the truth behind it. You cannot dismiss everything wholesale, but you need to discern and to draw distinctions between history, current politics, and attitudes of the people in the Church. And things must be called by their names.

And if it's not as much about enjoyment and excitement, at least it could be about peaceful prayer [about] those things that are lamentable and certainly deserve our attention as Christians through prayer and charity.

JW: Is there anything else you’d like to share?

Fr. Ilya: St. Augustine famously said that people who don't travel are like a book, and those who do travel are like a whole library of books. So I encourage people to travel, to see the beauty, and to believe that the world is still by far a safer and more beautiful place than mass media leads us to believe. 

We certainly could find Christ an inspiration in the church we attend, but it's rejuvenating to be in the places of our ancestors, where they prayed for generations, where they prayed for over 1,000 years. To understand that we are part of that community, part of that experience; to realize that history is not a museum, that the stones are not just stones but witnesses to great events that we admire and proclaim as dear.