site.btaExcited, "Happy, Proud: How Bulgarians Felt about New Church in London

"Excited", "happy", and "proud" were among the words used by Bulgarians to describe for BTA their emotions after visiting the new Bulgarian Church of St. John of Rila in London. They were very happy to join in the spiritual experience of the Resurrection Vespers with the Blessing of Five Loaves (Artoklasia), led by Bulgarian Patriarch and Metropolitan of Sofia Daniil on February 22.

"I feel wonderful, I am happy, I am going to cry, this should have happened a long time ago,", the Director of the Bulgarian Cultural Institute in London, Svetla Dionisieva, said.

In the words of the deputy principal of the Ivan Stancioff School at the Bulgarian Embassy in London, Zdravka Vladova-Momcheva, when she enters the new church, she feels spiritual uplifting and a boost to her self-confidence as a Bulgarian. She is grateful that she witnessed how the previous ambassador, Marin Raikov, representatives of Bulgarian business and ordinary people, as well as the Bulgarian school pooled in with what they could, be it pennies or enormous sums of money, but with enormous enthusiasm. The particular sums do not matter, for they have all gone in the wondrous beauty seen today,” she added.

The Chair of the Christian Journalists Club with the Union of Bulgarian Journalists, Reni Stoyanova, was also among those present in the church. For the last 20 years she has been visiting her daughter and her family in London regularly each year. Stoyanova finds her participation in the spiritual feast an enormous privilege. She used to visit the small chapel at the embassy and considers the new church an answer to the heartfelt prayers of believers who desired a larger place to gather. “The Divine miracle that we are seeing and witnessing right now, it is a great honor for a generation to be able to participate in the consecration of a church," she said.