The Skete of Orsa

IRL, the Taizé Community of ecumenical fame is founded in and based out of Taizé, a small town in Bourgogne where, to the best of anybody's knowledge, nothing interesting ever happened until 1940. (Brother Roger went to Taizé because it was isolated enough to escape military attention, and stayed because its population was lonely enough that he felt called by God to address it.)

As of Andalusada's present, the Taizé Community would still be twenty years in the future even if it was going to happen, which it most certainly is not, because the world's going to be wildly different enough that there won't be Nazis, or a united Germany, or an occupation of France at that point. Unless something else happens there, that little commune would be forever unknown to the world.

Fortunately, however, there is something that can happen there: Taizé is an hour's march from a neighbor whose claim to fame is secured before things even start. Because (Old World) places are far more likely to exist than people, and the Wars of Religion are still only a sketch, I asked a friend last night: "How would you feel about a Battle of Taizé?"

His response took me by surprise: "What would that do to the service style?" This is my answer.

Orsa during the Thousand Days

Writing revolutions, you need a day planner, and a comprehensive list of dramatis personae, to figure out what the hell goes on. So I don't know the issues on the table when Evgeny the Old goes to the wall, or when the Vechists finally secure control of Great Russia.

I can say, however, that the Swedish government handles things rather poorly. Poorly enough that, before 1920, the Vechist government sends one of Andalusada's great generals to teach the Swedes a lesson. That lesson is remembered by Swedes as "the Three Years' War" and everyone else as "the Thousand Days."

By the time the dust settles, Sweden has been spanked. Its economy is a shambles, standing on a tottering currency and unpleasant economic agreements; it has no ability to project power in the Baltic Sea, leaving Great Russia to contend against the Saxon bloc; some of its industrial base is in Russia, brought home carefully as spoils of war. Most importantly, Götaland (the heart of its population) has seen two years of urban warfare, every bit as heroic and hellish as the Hero Cities; for the next decade, parents will say, "Eat your spinach, children are starving in Sweden."

Pretty early on (before its fleets were crippled), every Swede with the option fled, or was evacuated, or had their children evacuated out of the lines of fire. For most of Götaland, that meant to Norway, or sometimes across the Baltic to Saxony and its neighbors. For everybody else, that usually meant inland. One of those inland places was a town named Orsa.

The Russian element: the Skete

The Thousand Days are going to end messily. I'm not totally sure about the details, and this isn't the right place to discuss them, but IRL the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad ended with messy withdrawals that left a lot of people behind - and they were over land. The Russian withdrawal at the end of the Thousand Days is going to be primarily an amphibious withdrawal, which complicates things more.

There are going to be Russians who survive the crucible of war, but don't survive to get shipped home. Because they were captured during the withdrawal. Because they were in hiding, and didn't surrender until it was too late to get a ticket. Because they were injured and judged unlikely to survive, and High Command gave the orders to abandon them, to burden the Swedes and free up space and resources for the walking wounded. (It wouldn't be out of character.) Because they were ethnic Swedes raised in the former Russian Empire, and weren't recognized as being Russians at all.

There are going to be soldiers who never come home. I'm thinking that some of them [who?] introduce the concept of the skete to Orsa. Maybe one or two gravitate to Orsa trying to recover from Stockholm syndrome. Maybe a chaplain is invited to come, and decides to stay. This, like all the other details, is still a stub, and will be expanded on as the details congeal a bit.

Why Orsa? Why the Skete of Orsa?

My considerations for this are pretty simple:

• Orsa's neither strategic nor accessible. Orsa is inland, away from the Thousand Days' littoral warfare; it's well north of any plausible major Swedish cities, too, and close enough to the Norwegian border that an expedition would cause diplomatic problems. The Russians, who already have their forces terribly overstretched, are going to leave the town untouched.
• Orsa has no accents or diacritics. This matters more than you think: people talk, and write, more about stuff they can spell and pronounce. Breaking the fourth wall a bit, this is true IRL too; every accent mark slows writing a bit, making Günther (and all his works, and all his pomps) a pain to write about compared to Oliver Farrell.
• Sweden is cosmopolitan enough for ecumenism. Sweden's no longer a great power by the start of the Thousand Days (much less the end), but it was in the past [when?]. And even as a secondary power, it's hardly a hermit kingdom innocent of the world. It started high-church Güntheritism; it's had plenty of exposure down the line to lower-church Prussian revivalism. Some of its best neighbors are Orthodox. (So is Great Russia, but that's hardly "best.") Sweden can be the place the Christian traditions cross-pollinate.
• Lake Siljan is apparently scenic. It never hurts to have a nice landscape, especially for an offbeat ecumenical movement.

And lacking any double entendres that I can find, Google Translate gives the Skete of Orsa its nihil obstat and I give it my imprimatur.

This is still a stub, but it's a nice stub.