Guest
The Uspensky Sobor (Cathedral) rose up from the ashes anew and was reconstructed during the time when I came to call Omsk my home. A park used to be here with a fountain, but the ground was always caving in, according to sources, and right below lay the holy relics of St. Sylvester, the Bishop of Omsk during the Bolshevik Revolution. During the destruction of the church in the 1930s, it seems a slab fell over and protected the grave where St. Sylvester had been secretly buried after being murdered, just as St. John Krondstadt was in St. Petersburg. St. Sylvester's relics now lie in the basement of the Uspensky church. The church was rebuilt and became the calling card photo for Omsk. The original church had been funded by the future emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, who donated a large sum to build the cathedral when he visited Omsk. The style is a beautiful Russian-Byzantine style that goes wild with pattern, color, and drama is connected to this church? Let's go back to 1918 to the bishop's residence opposite the cathedral. At three o'clock in the morning on the 5th of February 1918, an armed detachment shouted and brandished their weapons, cursing:“Where is the bishop?““I am an archbishop,“ the bishop Eminence Sylvester was seized, a revolver was placed against his temple, and, without giving him a chance to put on warm clothes, he was taken through the Siberian frost to the Council of Deputies. The leader of the group attacked the people in the bishop's house and, using a revolver, killed the bishop's steward, Nikolai Tsikura, with a fragmentation is hardly surprising then, that when the White army recaptured Omsk, Bishop Sylvester sided with Kolchak and blessed the White Army, in contrast to the militant atheism pushed by the Bolsheviks. For that reason, sometimes mixed reactions appear about the St. Sylvester today; however that is unfair. Later bishops lived and worked under the Soviet Powers, and while the relationship was tense, the church lived on. When the vote was put to the republics of the . later, almost all the republics strongly voted to stay together, but most wanted reforms. And in this context the church was already playing an active renewal in the late 1980s. When the people's vote was cast aside and the . broken up, then the temptation was for church goers, especially in the west, to view all Soviet history as something anti-church. But this is incorrect, as the same could be said about the American government too—that it is anything but Christian. In short, the church is above political movements, but political movements should not oppose the church. And indeed the Emperor in Byzantium and Russia preserved the church, although this was no magic formula as the Patriarch often clashed with the Emperor, for example, in Byzantium history, especially during the iconoclast Russia, no need exists to try to blacklist or whitewash the Soviet history. It just was. The challenge remains for people today to support the church and live by the precepts laid out over the centuries. 'The gates of hell will not prevail against it'.
