Expert: Chersonese Must Not Be Passed to Church
Chersonese may soon be included on the list of UNESCO's world heritage sites. According to a deputy of the Supreme Council of the Crimea, ex-head of the Committee on Protection of Monuments of the Crimea, Yurii Magarishchev, this idea is to be abandoned if a part of the territory of the reserve is passed to the permanent use of the church, reported radiosvoboda.org.
In the opinion of Magarishchev, Chersonese is an asset not only of Ukraine but of the whole world, that is everyone wishing to visit the monument and conduct scientific research.
"Very few ancient towns that are so presentable have been preserved. It is inadmissible to pass a part of it to religious confessions. There are two functioning churches in the territory of Chersonese and this should be enough for the church. I think, in reality, it is about the valuable land at the seaside, which can bring profit," explains the deputy.
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) itself denies that it treats the assets without care.
The press secretary of the head of the UOC-MP, Protopriest Heorhii Kovalenko, said to a correspondent of Radio Freedom that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate keeps historical monuments which are in its use with care.
According to him, the state and the church should cooperate to preserve the heritage left by previous generations. "Chersonese, th [Kyiv Cave] Monastery, Sophia, and other sites should be objects of joint use and responsibility. Services should be served there as they were built as churches. On the other hand, we must keep them according to the technologies developed by historians. I hope we will create a tradition in which museums and churches will peacefully coexist," said the priest.
According to a doctoral candidate at the Eastern Institute in Rome, historian Oleksii Havrykov, the National Preserve of Tauric Chersonese in Sevastopol is one of the best preserved ancient Greek cities in the world. However, in his opinion, its present status of a reserve is under threat.
