In a moving atmosphere the Feast of the Dormition was celebrated in Imvros, where Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew officiated the Divine Liturgy at the holy Church in his village, Saint Theodore.
“I came back to my homeland, to Imvros of our ancestors and our heart, who is always waiting for its estranged children to embrace them, to tell them that it is alive and breathing”, said Bartholomew to the congregation in his sermon after the Divine Liturgy.
“Thank God, here in our Imvros, today our smile can and does bloom again. Now we have home again. Not, of course, as it was a beautiful Lady. With all of it. And with its poverty. Honorable and decent poverty, but with a rich heart, with self-sufficiency, with austerity, with the ascetic ethos of Orthodoxy. Let us stay that way, as it was then, and never let the storm come and the hurricane that uprooted us. But, unfortunately, there came a time. To look at the culprits”.
Ecumenical Patriarch went on to say that “the fact that our schools unexpectedly reopened, gives us the right to hope, to be optimistic and to believe that Imvros is not a lost cause forever”.
Bartholomew was assisted during the Divine Service by Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Myra.
Afterwards, Ecumenical Patriarch honored with the officium of Chief Referendarius of the Great Church of Christ, his compatriot, Mr. Kyriakos Koutsomallis, Director of the “Vasilios and Eliza Goulandris” Foundation and the Modern Museum of Modern Art.
From his part, the Mr. Koutsomallis thanked Ecumenical Patriarch for the great honor he had reserved for himself and his family.