http://directionstoorthodoxy.org/mod/ne ... le_id=6734
Orthodox Community Finds Home in Ireland
By Conor Humphries
Staff Writer
Moscow Times
DUBLIN — From working as a nuclear physicist in Siberia to helping to buy Ireland's first Orthodox church, Father Georgy Zavershinsky has come a long way in the past decade.
So has his parish.
Back in 1997, the de facto center of Dublin's Russian-speaking community was a small hall offered for a couple of hours each week by a sympathetic Catholic priest.
Suspicious of outsiders, some fresh from risky journeys across Europe, asylum seekers from former Soviet countries exchanged information on how to avoid deportation.
Nine years later, buoyed by legal immigration from new European Union members Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and by a booming Irish economy, the country's Russian-speaking community has grown to 30,000, according to an estimate by Sorussi, the Union of Russian Speakers in Ireland.
The community boasts two Russian-language newspapers and dozens of stores — and this month Zavershinsky hopes the Russian Orthodox parish can finalize the purchase of a handsome 19th-century church.
"Everything is united around the church," he said. "It is the center of the Russian community in Ireland."
Last Friday, about 800 people attended a midnight service for Orthodox Christmas at the church, SS. Peter and Paul's, said Father Mikhail Gogoleff, the London-based head of the Orthodox Church in Ireland, who is also the official head of the parish. Gogoleff celebrated mass with Zavershinsky, and the church's two choirs — one Russian, one Georgian — provided music for the service, which was followed by a party in the church's basement.