A welcoming ceremony for one of the greatest Orthodox relics – Cincture of the Mother of God – was held on November 19, 2011, in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow.
First Vice President of St. Andrew Foundation and the Center of National Glory, Mikhail Yakushev, put forward the idea in 2012 that a unique pilgrimage project be organized, and this proved to be a groundbreaking event. He shared his thoughts with the Russkiy Mir portal:
These days you cannot help pondering the words of the Most Holy Patriarch Kirill about the crisis that is roving not only over Europe, but over the whole world, as the judgment of God. And you come to realize that this is happening to us right now as Our Lady’s Belt has been delivered to Russia from Vatopedi Monastery on Holy Mount Athos. We anticipated a great confluence, but we could not expect such a huge influx of the faithful. Representatives of the Patriarch’s Office in Moscow, the Moscow government, St. Andrew Foundation and the Center of National Glory agreed at the meeting in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior that probably not all the pilgrims would be able to venerate the holy thing, since numerous buses arrive in Moscow with devotees not only from the Greater Moscow area, but also from other regions of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus… Two million believers have already venerated the Blessed Virgin Mary’s Cincture and two million one hundred thousand little belts, made at the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent of Mercy by hundreds of volunteers as well as at other cloisters, have been given away.
The tradition to give away little belts blessed on Our Lady’s Cincture has long been cherished in Vatopedi Monastery, where the sanctity is enshrined. In recent years we all feel being drawn into the vortex of the East Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and see our lives in a different context like those devotees who were once praying in Constantinople. And the harder our financial and economic conditions are, the more we start thinking about the everlasting and spiritual values. Therefore each one should certainly travel to Greece to look at this beauty and venerate the Orthodox relics.
I’d suggest that you should recall what the Byzantine Orthodox culture is all about. As we get into Tsarigrad, Constantinople, whence a cruise of sacred sites of Greece will commence in May of 2012, and move across the Greek archipelago towards the Holy Mount Athos, we get back, as it were, to the bygone epoch that seems to have gone forever and no longer exists.
In reality it does exist, though. We do not sense our secular time on Holy Mount Athos, because we land in the Byzantine era, in the world where your historic memory triggers into action. The other days, I returned from Jerusalem where I go 5-6 times a year.
I was startled to see crowds of people in the Holy Land now, when neither Jews, nor Moslems, or Christians are celebrating any religious holiday. It seemed as though I landed in the Easter days, when you won’t want to go there because of the great abundance of people.
Interviewer: Irina Akhundova
