Patriarchs of Russia and Serbia Condemn Burning of Crosses in NATO + Albania Occupied Kosovo

💭 An archaeological-art festival in Kosovo and Metohija sparked controversy this year with an opening display that included the burning of crosses.

The Serbian Orthodox Diocese of Raška and Prizren condemned the “neopagan performance,” featuring what it called an “unprecedented and dishonorable act [that] represents a grave insult to all Christians.”

His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia also condemned the act in a letter to His Holiness Patriarch Porfirije, primate of the Serbian Orthodox Church, calling it a “vile act” that occurred on sacred land:

Your Holiness, beloved Brother and Concelebrant at God’s altar!

It was with deep sorrow that I learned of the sacrilegious act recently carried out by Kosovo Albanians on the ruins of ancient Ulpiana.

A composition of three crosses, reminiscent of the events of sacred history on Golgotha, was publicly burned at a local festival as part of a cheap farcical performance. This open desecration of the image of the Honorable Cross is a challenge to all Christians and an insult to their feelings: both Orthodox and Catholics, among whom there are also Kosovo Albanians.

This vile act was staged in Kosovo and Metohija—in the sacred Serbian land, where enemies of the Cross of the Lord and Holy Orthodoxy have long and persistently fought for de-Christianization.

The children of the Russian Church keep the memory of many Serbian brothers and sisters killed or expelled from their homeland, of thousands of destroyed crosses and tombstones in Serbian cemeteries, of hundreds of churches and monasteries of the Church of St. Sava, desecrated, burned or blown up by extremists.

I always pray for the good health of Your Holiness and for the granting of strength to Your Christ-loving flock, enduring oppression and sorrows in the land of Old Serbia. May the Father of mercies, and God of all comfort (2 Cor. 1:3) protect Your children and wipe away all tears from their eyes (Rev. 7:17), strengthening them in trials, shielding them from all trouble and misfortune.

Albania wasn't even a country until Austria-Hungary created it during WWI to cut off Serbia from the water – just like Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia were created by the Edomite Romans to cut off Ethiopia from the Red Sea and Ethiopian (Indian) Ocean.

💭 September 20, 2024

♱ The Date The True Cross was Brought to Ethiopia.

According to tradition, Empress Helena lit incense and prayed for assistance to guide her. The smoke drifted towards the direction of the buried cross. She dug and found three crosses; one of them was the True Cross used to crucify Jesus Christ. Empress Helena then gave a piece of the True Cross to all churches, including the Ethiopian Church. This piece was then brought to Ethiopia. According to the Ethiopian legend, when people get close to the piece of the True Cross it made them naked by its powerful light. Because of this, a decision was made to bury it at the mountain of Gishen Mariam monastery in Wollo region. The monastery of Gishen Mariam holds a volume of a book which records the story of the True Cross of Christ and how it was acquired.

The finding of the True Cross is celebrated in Ethiopia on every 26/ 27/28 September

☪ Islamic Hate for ♱ The Christian Cross፤ Muslims Hate The Cross Because Satan Hates The Cross

The fact is, Islamic hostility to the cross is an unwavering fact of life—one that crosses continents and centuries; one that is very much indicative of Islam’s innate hostility to Christianity.

Doctrine and History

Because the Christian Cross is the quintessential symbol of Christianity—for all denominations, including most forms of otherwise iconoclastic Protestantism—it has been a despised symbol in Islam.

According to the Conditions of Omar—a Medieval text which lays out the many humiliating stipulations conquered Christians must embrace to preserve their lives and which Islamic history attributes to the second “righteous caliph,” Omar al-Khattab—Christians are “Not to display a cross [on churches]… and “Not to produce a cross or [Christian] book in the markets of the Muslims.”

The reason for this animosity is that the cross symbolizes the fundamental disagreement between Christians and Muslims. According to Dr. Sidney Griffith, author of The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque, “The cross and the icons publicly declared those very points of Christian faith which the Koran, in the Muslim view, explicitly denied: that Christ was the Son of God and that he died on the cross.” Thus “the Christian practice of venerating the cross and the icons of Christ and the saints often aroused the disdain of Muslims,” so that there was an ongoing “campaign to erase the public symbols of Christianity, especially the previously ubiquitous sign of the cross.”

Islam’s hostility to the cross, like all of Islam’s hostilities, begins with the Muslim prophet Muhammad. He reportedly “had such a repugnance to the form of the cross that he broke everything brought into his house with its figure upon it.” He once ordered someone wearing a cross to “take off that piece of idolatry” and claimed that at the end times Jesus himself would make it a point to “break the cross”—an assertion the Islamic State regularly makes.

Islamic history following Muhammad is riddled with anecdotes of Muslims cursing and breaking crosses. Prior to the Battle of Yarmuk in 636, which pitted the earliest invading Muslim armies against the Byzantine Empire, Khalid bin al-Walid, the savage “Sword of Allah,” told the Christians that if they wanted peace they must “break the cross” and embrace Islam, or pay jizya and live in subjugation—just as his Islamic State successors are doing today in direct emulation. The Byzantines opted for war.

In Egypt, Saladin (d. 1193)—regularly touted in the West for his “magnanimity”—ordered “the removal of every cross from atop the dome of every church in the provinces of Egypt,” in the words of The History of the Patriarchate of the Egyptian Church.