UOC spokesman: Fighting Turkey, we didn’t recall our Patriarch in Istanbul

Deputy Head of UOC DECR Protopriest Nikolai Danilevich

There was a precedent in history when the Cossacks fought with Turkey, with the Patriarch of Constantinople in its capital. Protopriest Nikolai Danilevich, the deputy head of the UOC DECR, recalled this in an interview with the Zik TV channel.

Commenting on the thesis that Russia is present on the territory of Ukraine through the ROC or the UOC, he replied: “The Russian Orthodox Church is not the Church of the Russian Federation, it includes Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic countries, so you shouldn’t identify it.”

According to him, "there have been cases in history when we fought with Turkey, the Cossacks fought with Turkey, and the Patriarch of Constantinople sat in Turkey".

“There are such cases when, unfortunately, politicians, state authorities of Orthodox countries are fighting each other. This is wrong, it is a tragedy, it is temporary, we really hope for it and pray for it, but we should not mix political and church life,” said Protopriest Nikolai Danilevich.

As the UOJ reported, earlier Archpriest Nikolai Danilevich, the deputy head of the DECR, said that the UOC believers are attempted to be pushed out of the legal field and made outsiders, and the state behaves like a raider towards the UOC.

Read also