Eight years after the foundation stone was laid, construction on Warsaw’s Hagia Sophia Cathedral is finally complete. His Beatitude Metropolitan Sawa of Warsaw and All Poland announced the joyous news to the faithful of the Polish Church in a statement published Friday, thanking them for their financial, physical, and prayerful support of the construction process. The cathedral was built in honor of those who died in the Warsaw Uprising and labor camps in World War I and II and who were exiled, His Beatitude reminds. Therefore, prayers will be offered for the repose of their souls, “for us all to remember the suffering of our ancestors.”

Finally, Met. Sawa invites all the hierarchs, clergy, monastics, and faithful of the Polish Church to attend the long-awaited festive consecration of the cathedral on Sunday, May 14. The cathedral, based on the iconic Hagia Sophia Cathedral in Istanbul, is the first Orthodox church built in Warsaw in a century, and is one of a handful of active Orthodox parishes in the Polish capital.

There are about 30-40,000 Orthodox believers in Warsaw, who until now had only two active churches: the Cathedral of St. Mary Magdalene, built in 1867-1869, and the Church of St. John Climacus, built in 1905. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were several dozen Orthodox churches in the Polish capital, though most of them were destroyed in the 1920s. (Quelle: www.orthochristian.com, 13. Februar 2023)