The Police in Kaunas are investigating offensive inscriptions left on an Orthodox Christian church. Orthodox representatives say the faithful fear for their safety.
Representatives of the Orthodox Church in Kaunas, Lithuania’s second city, say the inscriptions with expletives, recently pasted on an Orthodox church, have to do with the war in Ukraine, adding that the incidents scare the faithful.
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The police were informed about the inscriptions on Saturday and are investigating a case of suspected incitement against a religious group.
“It’ sad, very sad. What do I say to those old women or old men who say they are afraid. I don’t know how long these people have been left to live, and they say they are afraid to go to communion, to confession, because they might be beaten up,” Deacon Konstantin Pankrasov told BNS on Sunday.
He says it was not the first such case. After initially treating offensive inscriptions as provocations, the Church representatives eventually turned to law enforcement, fearing for the safety of the faithful.
He said the buildings were plastered with obscene slogans about Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some of them quoted the famous phrase “Russian warship, go f**k yourself”, uttered during the February 2022 Russian attack on Snake Island in Ukraine’s territorial waters.
Pankrasov believes the incidents have to do with the recent split among Lithuanian Orthodox Christians over the church’s position on the war in Ukraine.
In April, the head of the Lithuanian Orthodox Archdiocese, Metropolitan Inokentiy, dismissed or suspended several church members. The latter said, however, that they resigned because they disapproved of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow supporting Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine.
Pankrasov says the dismissed priests’ version of events dominates in public discussions. According to him, public hostility towards the Lithuanian Orthodox Church is growing not only in Kaunas, but also in Klaipėda, even though the Orthodox Church, he says, is “helping” Ukrainians who have come to Lithuania “to the best of its ability”.
“We are under attack,” the cleric said. “We are not the Kremlin’s arm or mouthpiece, and why they are saying that is beyond comprehension. Some former priests, they made it up, they said it and people believe them. And nobody hears us.”
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