Our Church

   The word most often used to describe the church in Albania is resurrection - ngjallja. Everywhere you turn in the Church, the word or one of its icons awaits you. The church’s seminary is dedicated to the resurrection. The church newspaper is called Resurrection. Many churches have been given the same name.    During my final visit with the archbishop before returning home, Archbishop

   Late in my stay in Albania, sitting next to him one night as we drove along a narrow, winding mountain road, I asked if he could tell me about the prayer life that sustains him. "The roots must remain hidden", he replied, but after a long silence, he began to answer my question.     "I always start with the Jesus Prayer - Lord Jesus

   "Now they are subject to another propaganda - the idea that status in society equals having money. The new system says that the more money you have, the more important you are. But without of love and sacrifice, people become wild animals. Today, without religious communities, there is no hope. Otherwise they cannot understand sacrifice motivated by love, by belief in Christ. It is

   Related to the task of restoring the physical church and the understanding of what it means to pray together is the re-formation of understanding the co-responsibility of each person in the Church for the life of the Church. "We have three basic principles that I speak of again and again. The first is local leadership, next local language, and finally local finance. It is

   One of the most pressing tasks for Archbishop Anastasios was directing the effort to provide places for worship in a country in which churches had been methodically destroyed or made over into buildings with secular functions. Perhaps the archbishop's most visible achievement are all the churches that have been erected since he arrived. By the middle of 2001, 80 new churches had been built,

   Not all Albania's calamities occurred before the end of the rigid Communism in 1991. In 1997, Albania was plunged into anarchy after the collapse of pyramid investment schemes into which many Albanian had risked and lost their life savings.    "The country was on the verge of civil war", Archbishop Anastasios recalled. "It was a full disaster revealing all the fear and violence that

   In January 1991, one month after the government in Tirana had allowed the formation of non-Communist political parties and two months after his 61st birthday, Archbishop Anastasios received a telephone call from Patriarch Dimitrios in Istanbul asking if he would be willing to go to Albania as Exarch to see what if anything was left of the Orthodox Church? It was at the time