Mesa Potamos, Cyprus, July 17, 2019
60,000 Orthodox faithful participated in the nighttime Liturgy and cross procession in honor of the holy Royal Martyrs in Ekaterinburg last night, and the Liturgy for their feast was celebrated in parishes throughout the Russian Orthodox Church.
And one monastery in Cyprus is helping to spread the veneration of the Royal Martyrs in the Greek-speaking world as well.
For the second year in a row, the Monastery of St. John the Forerunner in Mesa Potamos, Cyprus celebrated the feast of the Royal Martyrs with a 6-1/2-hour All-Night Vigil and Liturgy.
The festal services were celebrated by the abbot of the monastery, Archimandrite Paisios, together with the clergy of the brotherhood and a number of visiting priests and deacons from various Cypriot cities and abroad. Among the pilgrims was a theology student from Syria who sang the polyeleos in Matins in Arabic, alternating with the choir in Greek.
Abbot Paisios
The Vigil began at 7:00 PM and the Divine Liturgy ended at 1:30 AM.
Some of the fathers of the monastery had read about the Royal Martyrs years ago and felt a strong reverence for them, though their veneration strengthened in the monastery after Abbot Paisios traveled to Ekaterinburg in 2017 with other Cypriot abbots at the invitation of the abbess of the Novo-Tikhvin Monastery in Russia.
Having visited the sites related to the martyrdom of the last Russian Royal Family, Fr. Paisios asked the fathers of the monastery, which has the obedience of authoring books, to write one on the lives and deaths of the Royal Martyrs, especially considering that no such book then existed in the Greek language.
The book, The Romanov Holy Royal Martyrs: What Silence Could Not Conceal, was published in February 2018 and was received with great enthusiasm by the faithful in Greece and Cyprus. It is already considered a great success and the brotherhood is now preparing the 3rd edition.
As OrthoChristian previously reported, an English translation is forthcoming.
The monastery is also home to relics of the Royal Martyrs that it received from an American friend who visited Ekaterinburg in 1994 and was given a small bit of the soil dug up from the grave which had held their remains, full of hair and bone fragments.
The monastery also commissioned an icon of the Royal Martyrs to be painted in Thessaloniki:
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