Petros VII, Patriarch of Alexandria, the spiritual leader of all Orthodox Christians in Africa, was among those who died died when a helicopter taking him and fellow churchmen to a monastic enclave in northern Greece crashed into the sea, government and church officials said.
The army helicopter, carrying 12 passengers and a four-member crew, disappeared from radar screens on Saturday as it approached Mount Athos.
PHOTO: EPA
Hours later, bodies and wreckage were found about 8km off the coast of northern Greece, army and coast guard officials said.
Rescue workers said the body of Patriarch Petros VII of Alexandria was among seven retrieved from the wreckage. The six other recovered bodies have not been identified.
"The government expresses its grief for today's accident and its tragic consequences," said government spokesman Theodoros Roussopoulos. "It is a great loss for the Patriarchate of Alexandria and for the Orthodox Church."
The cause of the crash was not immediately known.
Petros was spiritual leader of the estimated 300,000 Christian Orthodox church members in Africa, while Roman Catholics, Protestants and Coptics follow other clerical leaders.
"We are devastated upon receiving the information," said Archbishop Christodoulos, the leader of the Orthodox Church of Greece.
"He was full of life. He cared for everybody, everything and everyone," said Father Marcos, who was receiving condolence callers at the patriarchate in the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria.
Other passengers included Metropolitan Bishop of Carthage Chrysostomos, Metropolitan Bishop of Pelusim Ireneus, and Bishop of Madagascar Nectarios.
The twin-engine army Chinook took off from Elefsina airport near Athens and vanished from radar screens as it approached the monastic community.
Three Navy ships, a C-130 transport airplane and two Super Puma helicopters were searching for survivors, but strong winds were hampering rescue efforts, authorities said.
Petros's church -- one of the more than a dozen self-governing Orthodox churches -- traces its roots to St. Mark and includes one of the oldest Christian congregations in the world.
Petros, 55, was born in Cyprus and ordained in 1969. A year later he became a deacon in the patriarchate of Alexandria and then served in a variety of church positions throughout Africa.
Worldwide, there are an estimated 200 million Orthodox Christians led by the so-called "first among equals" among the patriarchs, Bartholomew I, who is based in Istanbul, Turkey -- the former Byzantine capital of Constantinople.
The all-male enclave of Mount Athos, about 100km southeast of Thessaloniki, is one of the centerpieces of Orthodox Christianity. Twenty monasteries dot the rugged peninsula -- called the "Holy Mountain" in Greek -- and many are only accessible by foot or boat.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the