MOSCOW, August 28. /TASS/. Russian Orthodox Christians celebrate the Assumption of the Virgin Mary on Tuesday, August 28. This is one of the twelve great feasts in the annual liturgical cycle of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

"On occasion of the feast, Patriarch Kirill I will lead a liturgy in the Assumption Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin in the morning and matins with the following right of entombment of the Mother of God in the Cathedral of the Savior in the evening," the Patriarch’s press service said.

The Holy Tradition, a crucial element of the Christian dogmatic teaching along with the Holy Scriptures suggests that the Virgin Mary died in Jerusalem at the age of 72 fifteen years after Jesus’s resurrection. She spent the last years of her life in the house of John the Apostle who would write the fourth Gospel later on.

"We would like to wish everyone to end our lives with the divine assumption," said Reverend Yevgeny Popichenko, the chief of the department for social service at the metropolitan district of Yekaterinburg. "In our Slavic language, the word ‘uspeniye’ [assumption or dormition, literally meaning ‘the falling asleep’ - TASS] is consonant not only with sleep but also with ‘maturity’, ‘ripeness’ and ‘success’. In other words, it means the summing up of a kind, the harvesting of fruits, the time when human soul is ripe and fit for the better life."

Christians mark the feast of Assumption with especial solemnity in the garden of Gethsemane in East Jerusalem where a church was built over the Virgin Mary’s presumable burial cave.

A Cross-bearing procession moves down the streets of Jerusalem on this day and people decorate buildings with garlands of green vegetation and throw flowers at the procession from rooftops.

In Russia, the believers, too, decorate church buildings with flowers on this feast.

Innumerable monasteries and churches are dedicated to the Assumption in Russia. One of the them is the main cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin that was the coronation place of the Grand Dukes of the Duchy of Muscovy and later on of all the Russian Czars up to the last Czar of the Romanov dynasty, Nicholas II.