Wonder if the russophobes will pick up on this...pics.
http://directionstoorthodoxy.org/mod/ne ... le_id=6782
Singing and dancing in the sanctuary of the oldest Orthodox church in Latvia
Riga, January 18, Interfax - The Latvian Orthodox Church intends to press for the final restitution of its Church of Sts Peter and Paul, the oldest Orthodox cathedral built in Riga as far back as under Catherine II.
In the Soviet time the cathedral was planned to be blown up. For this purpose the remains of bishops were preliminary reburied in the Church Hermitage of the Holy Transfiguration. In 1989 however the authorities made the final decision not to touch the building and handed it over to the Ave Sol national choir to be used as a concert hall, Metropolitan Alexander of Riga and All Latvia reminded Interfax.
‘It is a sacrilege to hold daily performances of secular songs and dances on the stage installed right in the sanctuary’, he protested.
The Latvian law on restitution provides for the restitution of property in possession before 1940 to its former owners. But none of those who claim the building can provide authentic evidence that it had belonged to them and its possessor today is not even the state but the Riga City Council.
‘It is evident to all though that it is a worship building. Its cupola is still crowned with a cross, while its interior pendentives still carry the Orthodox images of the four Evangelists with Church Slavonic inscriptions’, the metropolitan related.
“Some hotheads among the nationalists clamor that we are ‘a wrong Church’ and that it is the Patriarchate of Constantinople that is the legal successor to the pre-revolutionary Russian Orthodox Church”, and there is a real danger that the church will be put under the jurisdiction of Patriarch Bartholomew.
The Latvian Church has won two law suits for the church, that is, she is now its legal possessor, but ‘it is very difficult to fight with the Riga City Council’, Metropolitan Alexander notes.