Metropolitan Volodymyr Greeted Kyivites on the Day of Kyiv

Ukrainian Orthodox Church

Honorable Kyivites! Dear brothers and sisters!
Residents of our State’s capital and parishioners of the cathedral city of our Church!

Every day we see these Kyivan hills upon which the grace of God has shone. And the great city has rosen. And the Lord has built many churches. That’s what the Holy Apostle Andrew the First-Called foresaw almost two thousand years ago.

Lately we have commemorated 1020 years of the Baptism of Rus by the Holy and Equal-to-the-Apostles Kyivan Prince Volodymyr and the day of his church remembrance became a national feast – the day of the Baptism of Rus. This year we mark 1150 years of the historical event of baptizing a part of Kyivites by the Kyivan prince Ascold. The Holy and Right-Believing Prince Yaroslav turned Kyiv into a Christina gold-domed city, crowned by the Cathedral of St Sophia, the Wisdom of God – the cathedral of Kyivan metropolitans. And it is almost 1000 years that Oranta – Mother of God the Unbreakable Wall protects us.

It is not by chance that Kyiv is called New Jerusalem. As in Jerusalem the main shrines of Christianity rest and as the Church took its rise at Zion room, the same way Christianity in Rus took its rise in Kyiv. The Dnieper is Our Jordan River – there Rus was baptized. The Kyiv Caves Monastery is the Russian Athos, for it is from here that the Russian monkhood originates. The hierarchy of the Russian Church started from the Holy Hierarch Michael, the first metropolitan of Kyiv, and Hieromartyr Volodymyr, Metropolitan of Kyiv chairs many-thousand synaxis of the new martyrs of the 20th century.

Today Kyiv restores its golden-domed churches and monasteries after the sequent atheist onset. At the same time the new churches rise on the Dnieper’s riverside. This year the Ukrainian Orthodox Church started building its main temple – the Cathedral of Resurrection of Christ and its large Religious-Enlightenment Center which has to become the center of educational, social and charitable activity of our cathedral city and all Ukraine.

We heartily greet the Kyivites on the Day of Kyiv! We wish God’s assistance in all the good deeds. Peace, consent, love of God and God’s blessing to you! We pray that God sent each of you everything necessary for salvation of immortal soul and all required for the earthy life, through the intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos, through the prayers of the Holy and Equal-to-the-Apostles great Prince Volodymyr and Princess Olga, our venerable and God-bearing Fathers Anthony and Theodosius of the Kyiv-Caves and all the Kyivan saints.

† Volodymyr,
Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine,
Primate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church

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