The festivities for our patronal feast of St. George began Thursday night with Festal Vespers with about 10 priests. Our parish is fortunate to have a small piece of St. George's relics, along with those of St. Barbara, St. Theodore, St. Arsenios, and St. Euthymia, which were put out for veneration.
In the photo above, my friend Fr. Gregory is standing before the Holy Table during Vespers.
In the photos above and below, you can see Fr. Michael, a hieromonk and one of the Metropolis' preachers (a special, dedicated position and charism), who came to give a short talk about the life of St. George.
Fr. Panayiotis during Orthros on Friday morning.
On Friday morning, we again had 10 priests (5 of whom were hieromonks), two deacons, and two bishops -- our own, Metropolitan Anthimos of Thessaloniki, and a guest he was hosting, a Russian archbishop from southern Siberia, Ionafan (Tzvetkov) of Abakan and Kyzyl (see below).
All of us around the Holy Table.
The front of St. George's. Children from the public schools came to the church for the feast. Some of the younger ones were playing outside for a bit.
As you can see, the church was quite full on Friday morning.
After the Liturgy, I had the blessing to go for a coffee with the Russian archbishop and a few of his priests from his archdiocese. He explained that his archdiocese was located in southern Siberia, and he joked that because it was "southern" it didn't get below -50 C in the winter. I believe his name was Agathon, but I can't seem to find any information about him on the web, so maybe I'm not remembering his name correctly.
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