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Patriarch Kirill to lead church service in Krymsk

Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill will arrive in Krymsk on April 21

Photo ITAR-TASS

Photo ITAR-TASS

MOSCOW, April 21 (Itar-Tass) - Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill will arrive in Krymsk on April 21, the fifth Sunday of the Great Lent. Krymsk, a town in Russia’s southern Krasnodar territory, was badly hit by floods early in July 2012.

"The head of the Russian Orthodox Church will lead a church liturgy in the Church of Archangel Michael where a church emergency center was set up in the first hours of the tragedy to help the victims,” Deacon Alexander Volkov, the patriarch’s press secretary, told Itar-Tass. He recalled that on July 23 this year the patriarch had held a prayer in the aforesaid church for the health of the injured and a funeral service for the dead.

Patriarch Kirill will also meet the citizens of Krymsk and assess the results of the church service in this city.

The church headquarters in Krymsk handed over targeted aid to more than 3,500 families and distributed over a thousand tons of relief cargoes. A church charity department collected more than 50 million rubles worth of donations. A new house was bought for a family with many children. The local residents also received aid from volunteers who arrived in Krymsk from various eparchies and the Moscow Theological School.

Torrential rains caused the most destructive floods in the history of the Krasnodar territory on July 6-7, 2012. Ten populated localities, including Gelendzhik, Novorossiisk and the villages of Divnomorskoye, Nizhnebakanskaya, Neberdzhayevskaya and Kabardinka, were affected by the flood. However, the town of Krymsk with a population of 57,000 people located 100 km away from Krasnodar was worst hit by the disaster. The floods claimed the lives of 168 people, according to reports of the regional administration.

According to its estimates, the overall damage from flloods was at least 20 billion rubles. Fifty-three thousand people were officially recognized as disaster victims, of who 29,000 lost property. About 7,200 houses were flood-stricken. About 2,000 households were totally destroyed.

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