« His Grace Bishop Matthew of Sourozh arrived in Vancouver, Canada »

On December 14, 2023, as part of an archpastoral visit to Canada, His Grace Bishop Matthew of Sourozh, temporary administrator of the Patriarchal parishes in the USA and Canada, arrived in Vancouver, the largest city in the province of British Columbia, located on the west coast of Canada.

In 1897, with the blessing of Bishop Nicholas of the Aleutians Islands and Alaska (Ziorov; 1891–1898), representatives of the Russian Orthodox Seattle Mission, priest Dimitry Kamnev and reader Vladimir Alexandrov, visited Vancouver for the first time during a missionary trip to the province of Alberta. Later, in 1901, it was Vancouver that became the first stop on the way across Canadian soil during the archpastoral visit to Canada by Bishop Tikhon (Bellavin) of North America and Alaska, the future Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia.

While in Vancouver, His Grace Bishop Matthew visited the city cemetery of Mountain View, where he served a panikhida at the grave of the recently deceased ROCOR cleric Protodeacon Christopher Birchall, author of a scientific-historical study on the presence of Russian Orthodoxy in Great Britain, “Embassy, Emigrants and Englishmen: The Three Hundred Year History of a Russian Orthodox Church in London.”

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