Μάιος 2018

In this world, son, people are divided into good and bad, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, polite and rude, clever and stupid. But they all have one thing in common: pain. When you’re in pain, son, gather all your spiritual powers and try to understand the purpose of the pain, because through it God’s opening the heavens to you. Do you think that He Who numbers the hairs on your head doesn’t know the measure of your pain? He does. So rest assured in our heavenly Father. Don’t be disheartened. Together with Christ, you’ll get through everything, because you’ll become His heir, in the infinite riches of our common Father. Amen.

If you want somebody to understand you, you have to become like them. This is what God did: He became human, spoke like us, interacted with us on all human levels- except sin- and so was able to communicate with us fully. So Christ came to save us and didn’t merely meet us as we are, but did something more: He gave Himself that we might live. In other words, He gave up everything He had and sacrificed Himself.

Today (May 29), the Orthodox Church remembers the Fall of Constantinople, the Queen of Cities, in 1453. Named after Saint Constantine the Great, Constantinople was the capital of the Byzantine Empire (330-1453). Although Byzantium’s vast power spanned 11 centuries, its story is often held hidden. In his 2006 book, “Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World,” Colin Wells describes it as: The successor of Greece and Rome, this magnificent empire bridged the ancient and modern worlds for more than a thousand years. Without Byzantium, the works of Homer and Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle, Sophocles and Aeschylus, would never have survived. Yet very few of us have any idea of the enormous debt we owe them. More than just the cultural, ...

The new martyr Nannos/Ioannis belongs to the Macedonian new martyrs. He was martyred in Smyrna in 1802 when he was only 17 years old. He was born in Thessaloniki of Macedonian parents. His father came from the village of Avret-Issar, nowadays old Yinaikokastro in the prefecture of Kilkis, a mere 30 kilometres to the north of Thessaloniki and his mother in the village of Lokovi, today’s Taxiarhis, in Halkidiki. They became acquainted in Thessaloniki, where they both lived, created a family and had two boys, the elder, Theodoros, and the younger, Ioannis, whose pet name was Nannos in order to distinguish him from his father, who was also Ioannis.   The family was Greek and Orthodox, God-fearing and believing in Christ, values ...

At the fall of Constantinople, in 1453, it was not only Greeks pitched against Turks, as  is, perhaps, widely believed, but there was also a good number of foreigners involved. Some of these were forced to fight on the side of the Ottomans, such as an attachment of Serbs sent by the despot of medieval Serbia, Đurađ Branković, who was a subject of the Ottomans. Others again, such as Orban, the Hungarian (or Rumanian) canon maker, joined the Ottomans on the expectation of making a profit (Orban was richly rewarded for the construction of the massive bombard which the Turks used during the siege and which was trained, for the most part, on the gate of Saint Romanos). Most of ...

Previous post This is the same Holy Spirit Who preached by the prophets, Who gave understanding to the Apostles, Who spoke to people. He was given to them by the Lord, and all their adversaries were unable to gainsay or resist Him. As the Lord said: ‘It is not you that speak, but the Spirit of your Father Who speaks in you’. This Holy Spirit also or¬dains priests, consecrates churches, purifies altars, perfects sacrifices and cleanses people of their sins. This Holy Spirit abides with the godly, refines the righteous and guides kings. This same Holy Spirit preserved the soul of Simeon, lengthening the time of his life and re¬versing the rules of death, until the day when he beheld Him ...