Rating: 8,4|Votes: 20
A true incident which shocked and brought repentance to hundreds of people in the Russian Soviet city of Kuibyshev (modern day Samara), in the year 1956.
Rating: 5,1|Votes: 15
St John has sometimes been described as an unoriginal thinker, a mere compiler of the existing tradition. It was not St. John’s intent to come up with ideas unique to himself. Toward the beginning of his work, The Fountain Head of Knowledge, he writes, “I will say nothing of my own.” While that may not be acceptable or rewarded in the scholarship and academia of today, it reveals St. John’s faithfulness to the tradition.
Rating: 10|Votes: 8
By day, she was able to gaze upon the wooded hills, the swiftly flowing rivers, and the meadows covered with a mottled blanket of flowers; by night the harmonious and majestic vault of the heavens twinkled and provided a spectacle of inexpressible beauty. Soon the virgin began to ask herself questions about the First Cause and Creator of so harmonious and splendid a world.
Nun Nectaria (McLees)
Rating: 10|Votes: 3
Also, he had a sense of humor. For example, some of the sources say that when he first saw the saunas of the Slavs in what is now Novgorod he wrote letters to friends saying, “These Slavs are such strange people; they torture themselves with birch branches.” He was laughing about it. You cannot imagine him as a master of strictness. He was a humorous man, very humble, very easy. As a Mediterranean person he was surprised by these strange traditions. Of course, he was also a man who had seen many things.
Nun Nectaria (McLees), George Alexandrou
Rating: 4|Votes: 32
After the dormition of the Mother of God, St. Andrew began his final journey from Jerusalem. The trail of tradition says that he went back to Pontus, then to Georgia, to the Caucuses, and to the Sea of Azov in southern Russia. From there he went to Donets, to the Crimea, up the Dnepr River to Kiev and to the Scythians of the Ukraine. In the Crimea, where he stayed with the Greeks of Sebastopol and Cherson, we know that there were first-century Christian communities organized by St. Andrew himself. From the Crimea and Kiev in the Ukraine, he would have gone north by river to what is now Moscow, to Novgorod and then to Lake Ladoga (Valaam).