Local government officials removed and threw away roof tile, broke all the windows and destroyed the window frames
By Spero News
In response to destruction of a historic http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=702 Christian Church by eight officials of a local Ministry of Forestry in Turkey, His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew (photo) sent an official letter to Mevlut Kurban, the District Elder of Princess Islands, expressing his “strong disappointment and shock.”
The Monastery, which is undergoing renovation due to a grant from Dr. Stephen and Dr. Anna Yallourakis of Kingsport, TN, was vandalized on Tuesday, November 13, 2007. Local government officials removed and threw away roof tile, broke all the windows and destroyed the window frames.
The officials threatened the residents and demanded that they abandon their homes because the houses were being demolished.The Ecumenical Patriarch emphasized that Christ the Savior Monastery “had survived numerous fires and earthquakes throughout hundreds of years. In is uncivil to brutalize a sacred building that carries so much cultural history, and unjust to destroy it, especially when Istanbul has been picked to be the capital of civilized Europe in 2010.”
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