The world-famous International Festival of Church Music "Hainauka" will be held for the 41st time this year.

The festival will take place in Bialystok, the capital of the Podlaskie Voivodeship, on September 21-25.

13 choirs from Europe, Africa and the Middle East will perform in the auditions, but there will be no participants from Belarus and Russia, Dziennik.pl reports.

The reason is Russia's war against Ukraine.

The festival will take place in Bialystok, the capital of the Podlaskie Voivodeship, on September 21-25.

The event was usually held in May, but in 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic, it was held in September for the first time.

A similar term was approved in 2021 and now.

As the organizers of the "Church Music" foundation admit, this year's festival was affected by the political situation in the world and Russian aggression against Ukraine.

As the head of the fund and director of the festival Mykola Bushko

stated at the press conference on Wednesday

, for this reason, the list of performers does not include choirs from Russia and Belarus - countries traditionally associated with the Orthodox Church.

Only one performer from Ukraine will take part in the auditions - the bishop's choir "Znamenia" from Rivne.

Belarus will be represented by the Choir "Concordia", founded by political refugees, which works in Warsaw.

The band will perform at the festival as a representative of "Free Belarus".

It is noted that the participants themselves invited the use of such a term, it is recorded in the program of the festival.

Director Bushko said that the war had different effects on the formula of the festival.

"Many choirs - from outside the region where there is Orthodox music - show much less interest in church music, treating church music unfairly as purely Russian music.

Forgetting that the origins of Orthodoxy are not Moscow, but Kyiv," he emphasized.

The festival will open on September 21 with the concert "Ukraine and Poland in Orthodox church music".

"This concert is a tribute to Ukraine performed by Polish musicians.

The main idea is the relationship between the two countries in the topic of church music.

The works of Ukrainian and Polish composers will be performed, as the festival has been showing for many years that church music is not only Russian music," Mykola Bushko told journalists.