METROPOLITAN ILARION THINKS NOT ONLY BULGARIA BUT ALSO ALL COUNTRIES OF FORMER WARSAW PACT ARE PRONE TO RECONSIDER HISTORY
Interfax-Religiia, 12 March 2018
The head of the synodal Department of External Church Relations, Metropolitan of Volokolamsk Ilarion, thinks that the tendency to revise history and diminish Russia's role in important events of Europe is characteristic of all countries of the former Warsaw bloc.
"I think that to one degree or another this pertains to all countries of the so-called post-soviet space and all countries of the former Warsaw pact , which today almost unanimously have joined the military block of NATO," the metropolitan said on a broadcast of Church and World on the Rossiia-24 channel.
In his opinion, a rewriting of history has occurred in Bulgaria: several years ago at ceremonies on the occasion of the regular anniversary of the liberation of Bulgaria from the Turkish yoke, Russia was not named at all, although in actuality it was Russia that declared war on Turkey, it was Russia that liberated Bulgaria, and it is to the Russian Tsar Liberator Alexander II that a monument stands in the very center of Sofia and he is commemorated for the repose of his soul in each liturgy at the great entrance.
"The Russian army included representatives of various nationalities. Romania contributed to the liberation of Bulgaria from the Turkish yoke, but it was the Russian army that was the main force that assured this victory," Metropolitan Ilarion thinks.
He described how during the visit of Patriarch of Moscow and all-Rus Kirill to Bulgaria, a multitude of assembled people waved Bulgarian and Russian flags in greeting the Bulgarian and Moscow patriarchs, and this evoked very positive emotions.
"But when in the evening of the very same day, in Sofia itself at the monument to the Liberator Alexander II, something happened resembling a military parade but there the rhetoric was completely different and various nations were mentioned, various states, and this provoked the very just criticism of the patriarch, who saw in this a trend that is characteristic of the present-day European Union," the metropolitan noted.
He said this trend consists in hushing up the role of Russia in such key events of European history as, for example, the liberation of Bulgaria from the Ottoman yoke. (tr. by PDS, posted 12 March 2018)
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