Print This Post

The year 2018 marks the 40th anniversary of the demise of Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad and Novgorod, an outstanding hierarch of the 20th century. Representatives of the Russian-speaking Parish of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker in Limassol, Cyprus, requested the city authorities to consider their initiative to rename the street, in which the parish church under construction is situated, after Metropolitan Nikodim (Gr. Μητροπολίτου Νικοδήμου Ρότωφ).

According to the rector of the parish, Father George Vidyakin, the local authorities responded to this request gladly and after the necessary procedures made an affirmative decision.

‘His Eminence Nikodim was a longstanding chairman of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate. Therefore, it is very symbolic that a street named after him should appear at one of our parishes abroad’, Father George said, ‘It is difficult of overestimate the scale of this personality, his longstanding thorough work for the good of the Church and for the sake of Christian unity. His reverential attitude to the liturgy is an example to us. We seek to realize in our parish many of the principles he laid in with regard to the divine service’.

As the official portal of the Russian Orthodox Church reports with reference to the information given by the Parish of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker in Limassol, it is the first street in the world to be named after Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov).

***

The Parish of St. Nicholas in Limassol was founded in 1995. On June 9, 2012, His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, during his visit to the Orthodox Church of Cyprus, laid a foundation stone of the new church. Since May 2016, construction work has been carried out there.

At present, divine services are celebrated in Russian in the church of Christ the Lover of Mankind, which has been temporarily given for use to the Russian-speaking community, and in the Chapel of St. Alexis of Moscow, on Sunday and holidays and commemoration days of Russian and Cyprus saints. All the necessary information is available on the parish website and on the site of the church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker under construction. The parish runs a center of spiritual and moral culture, called ‘Sophia’.