The Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia will celebrate the canonization of a 20th-century hieromartyr in June. New Martyr Stanislav Nasadil, who suffered and died in a concentration camp in Gospić, Croatia in 1941, was recently added to the Church’s calendar. The local canonization of the hieromartyr will take place at the Cathedral of…

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  A spokesman for Turkey’s ruling party, AKP, this week again confirmed that the Erdogan-dominated Turkish government wants to reconvert the Hagia Sophia into a Muslim mosque. In a briefing of foreign correspondents in the country, spokesman Omer Celik responded to a question by Sigma TV by saying that Erdogan’s pre-election pledge for Hagia Sophia…

  An emotional pilgrimage was undertaken recently to the isolated and mountainous Syrian town of Maaloula, located some 60 kilometers northeast of Damascus on the border with Lebanon. Groups of Syrian nationals living in Russia, and Russians residing in war-torn Syria, visited the historic town, the scene of repeated clashes in 2013 and 2014 between…

  The Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, His Holiness Kirill, this week referred to the significant role that the Church can play in diplomacy and the formulation of Moscow’s foreign policy. The Russian Patriarch made the statement during a meeting with students of the Russian foreign ministry’s academy of diplomacy.

  The Orthodox Church is the institution that enjoys the biggest percentage of citizens’ trust in Georgia, according to a recent study by the local affiliate of Transparency International. The survey shows that 55 percent of respondents in the country trust the Church, followed by teachers, at 31 percent, and physicians, at 22 percent. Conversely,…

  Restoration works continued this week at the Sts. Constantine & Helen Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Cairo, Egypt. A video posted by the ethnic Greek community in the Egyptian capital is found today on the web pages of the Orthodoxia news agency.   

A long-standing legal battle between the municipality of Munich and the Greek state over the utterly delayed construction of a new Greek school in the Bavarian city was detailed this week in an article by the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. The paper reports that the municipality is intent on demolishing the construction site, where the school…

The Orthodox Christian Studies Center welcomed 28 scholars and journalists to Fordham from March 20 to 22 for the first seminar in its five-year research initiative on Orthodox Christianity and human rights. The meetings brought together an international group of experts in Orthodox Christianity from several disciplinary backgrounds and areas of specialization to discuss the…