Metropolitan Oleksandr Drabinko of Pereyaslavl and Vishneve performed a memorial service for Hetman Ivan Mazepa for the first time in modern Ukraine in the St. Sophia of Kyiv Nature Reserve, in the Mazepa Chapel of the main church.
This event, which was broadcast by TSN, was mentioned by the website "Ukrainian Voice".
This event is unique, the hierarch said. After all, starting with Tsarist Russia, and then during the Soviet era, the figure of Mazepa was humiliated in every possible way, and the facts about his life were distorted.
"We pay tribute to him, pay tribute to his feat, consider him a unique historical figure who brought Ukraine to a new diplomatic level. A unique person is a genius who at one time walked much faster than society did," says the hierarch.
Here, in St. Sophia of Kyiv, the Mazepa Gospel is on display, printed exactly 314 years ago in the city of Aleppo at the expense of the Hetman at the request of the then Patriarch Athanasius Dabbas III of Antioch. Copies of the Gospel were searched in the Middle East, but found here, in Kyiv, says Ukrainian Ambassador to Lebanon Ihor Ostash.
"The preface of patriarch Athanasius of Antioch is very important for us because it is dedicated to Hetman Ivan Mazepa on 7 pages, this is a text that should be in the history textbooks of Ukraine," he says.
A direct descendant of the patriarch of Antioch, Caesar Antoine Dabbas, and his family specially came to the presentation from Lebanon. His wife Yana is Ukrainian.
The grand opening of the exhibition ended with a performance by lirnyk Yarema, who performed the unique "St Sofia Carol", which Ivan Franko found and published in 1889, and which was again performed for the first time in more than a hundred years.