Τhe few remaining Christians on the northeast Aegean island of Tenedos, joined the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s Metropolitan of Imvros and Tenedos, His Eminence Kirillos, on Tuesday morning for a sanctification of the waters service, on the eve of the Epiphany.
In a brief statement, His Eminence noted that “…we gathered here today, the few remaining Orthodox Christians, to celebrate on Tenedos. We tossed the Cross into the sea to sanctify the waters, and also, to pray and ask God to bestow on humanity a blessed new year, with good health and strength for all; a year of peace for all peoples.”
The small isle of Tenedos, along with larger and nearby Imvros, hosted an exclusively ethnic Greek population for millennia, with storied references made as far back as Homer’s Iliad. The two islands were handed to the new republic of Turkey in 1923 with the Treaty of Lausanne. Since then, the ethnic Greek and Orthodox Christian residents of the two isles have dwindled significantly, due to repeated state bureaucratic obstacles and outright persecution by the Turkish state, such as expropriation of privates lands and even the building of open prisons on Imvros.
