Warsaw, March 19, 2018
Photo: www.orthodox.pl His Beatitude Metropolitan Sava of Poland has invited the clergy and faithful of the Polish Orthodox Church to attend the first Divine Liturgy in the capital’s new Agia Sophia Cathedral on Saturday May 19, reports the press service of the Romanian Orthodox Church.
The cathedral is the first new Orthodox church in Poland in a century.
According to the press release from the metropolitan’s chancellery, this will be the second important moment in the history of the cathedral, after the laying and consecration of the foundation stone by His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in December 2015.
Met. spoke of the history of the present site of the new church at the 2015 consecration:
The new cathedral Agia Sophia represents a prayerful gratitude brought to our Orthodox predecessors, who offered their lives on the altar of serving God and the homeland. This is the land upon which Holy Trinity Church was situated, a land sprinkled with the blood of the Warsaw insurgents, who in the year 1944 sheltered in this church, as well as the land on 138 Wolskiej Str., where the Nazi Germans killed children and their teachers in an Orthodox Orphanage. Agia Sophia Cathedral will be a monument in honor of the Orthodox refugees of 1915, martyrs of Chełmska and Podlasie lands, and the victims of Vistula (Wisła) Action rom Furmanów village, and in honor of those who suffered and gave their lives for Orthodoxy,
“Many of us have placed a personal brock in its walls as an expression of our faith and love for our forefathers,” the metropolitan writes.
All are also invited to the placing of the holy Cross on the cathedral’s main dome, which will take place the same day, and which will be a wondrous event “on the occasion of the 100 years since the regaining of Poland’s independence.”
