Father Dan Skvir ’66 Tended to Princeton’s Orthodox Christian Community

By the time John Pouschine ’79 left for college, he was fairly fed up with church.

Longtime close friends had been “at each other’s throats” over a sort of schism happening in the Russian Orthodox faith. “It really got me down on religion,” Pouschine says, and he didn’t plan to participate at Princeton.

But then at freshman orientation he discovered Princeton’s Orthodox Christian Fellowship (OCF), and that led him to Father Dan Skvir ’66, the Orthodox chaplain. Chatting with him and the other clergy turned Pouschine around. Before long, services at Murray-Dodge Hall on Sundays led to dinners at Skvir’s house and choir rehearsals with his wife, Tamara “Tassie” Skvir *70, and before Pouschine knew it, he was saying the same thing that everyone who joined and loved the OCF under Skvir’s leadership says: These people have become family.

Tassie Skvir described a little community of townspeople, professors, and students who come for four years — sometimes 10 if they’re in grad school — and stay in touch. Years down the road many asked Dan Skvir to officiate their weddings and baptize their children.

“You end up having this core of incredible — I don’t even know what to call it,” Tassie Skvir says. “I just call ’em family.”

Dan Skvir served as chaplain for 36 years; Princeton does have staff chaplains, but he was always a volunteer. He was born Orthodox — his father was a priest — and he married into it as well: His father-in-law, John Turkevich *34, was a Princeton chemistry professor and the previous Orthodox chaplain.

Skvir grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey, and at Princeton he studied religion and waited outside classrooms for Tassie, trying to win her over. Tassie’s mother, Ludmilla B. Turkevich, was the first woman to teach at Princeton, and Tassie was studying Slavic languages. They married in 1967 and had two daughters.

“He had very few faults,” Tassie says of her husband, pausing for a moment and then laughing. “I would say the main fault was sneaking doughnuts.”

They stayed local, and Dan Skvir found work at Princeton Day School, about two miles from Nassau Hall. There he served in various teaching and administrative roles over 41 years, including counseling; an obituary by the Orthodox Church in America called him “the spiritual father of the school.”

He earned that title at the OCF, too. Alumni describe a quiet but incredibly knowledgeable chaplain, the kind who gently tugs you deeper into your faith. Above all, they remember him as a terrific listener. Sarah Graham ’03 says he’d patiently hear everything you had to say, then sum it up for you and offer a bit of advice.

“He was a person that it was very easy to speak with, about anything,” Pouschine says.

Emotion fills Cynthia Michalak ’09’s voice when she describes a health issue she had at age 38. Frightened, she went to see Dan and Tassie Skvir, who listened and gave her an icon of a saint known for healing. She left feeling much better, that everything would be OK and she could lean on God and her faith.

“I don’t know that many people can say that about their priest from college,” she says.

A crew of alumni is now trying to raise an endowment — hopefully $1 million — to fund a part-time Orthodox chaplain. “Because Dan did this for nothing,” Tassie Skvir says, “but you can’t ask a priest or chaplain to come in and do it for nothing.”

“I think it’s incredibly important that this exists for students,” Michalak says. “Thinking about my own formation, thinking about the legacy that is there, it feels like a duty to have that continue on.”

Elisabeth H. Daugherty is PAW’s digital editor.