Visit of His Holiness Patriarch Kirill Began
At 8:50 AM the plane with His Holiness the Patriarch on board landed at the airport of Boryspil. At the passenger steps the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church was welcome by three girls in national costumes with the traditional bread and salt.
With their greeting words “Welcome, Your Holiness, at the holy Ukrainian land” and offering the pie and flowers the long-awaited visit of the First Hierarch to the Ukrainian land began.
In Boryspil waiting for the arrival of His Holiness were the Primate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church His Beatitude Volodymyr, the hierarchs of the UOC and numerous clergymen of the Diocese of Kyiv.
The Patriarch arrived with the delegation of the Russia Orthodox Church and a group of the Russian journalists to present this event in the mass-media. Let’s note that this visit to Ukraine is the first one for Patriarch Kirill in the office of the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Last year, in 2008, Patriarch Alexy II visited Ukraine, previously there had been no visits of the Primates of the Russian Orthodox Church due to instability of inter-church relations in Ukraine.
Patriarch Kirill expressed his wish to visit Kyiv, “the Holy Land of our Church”, right after his enthronement, noting that “the Venerable Nestor the Chronicler wrote about Kyiv as the place “from where the Russian land came”. “Here the most crucial event in the life of our ancestors took place – the Baptism of Rus, here our Church was born, having become the basis of the eastern Slavonic civilization, whose successors we are… Kyiv is the origin of all origins”, noted His Holiness Patriarch Kirill in the previous interviews.
Snaps From: fotolitopys.in.ua
