> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://theparnassian.com/en/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Patriarch Kirill on skis in Switzerland in 1971 and Pope John Paul II on skis in northern Italy in 1984
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/patriarkh-kirill-na-lyzhakh-v-shveitsarii-v-1971-godu-i-papa-rimskii-ioann-pavel-ii-na-lyzhakh-v-severnoi-italii-v-1984-godu/
- Published: 2026-06-04T06:31:45.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:25:56.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Faith, Humour

The heads of the largest churches are bound together by snow. John Paul II skied all his life: first in Poland, in the Tatras, and then, having become pope, he slipped away in secret more than a hundred times to the Italian mountains, to Gran Sasso and Adamello, and gave it up only in 1987, when his health would no longer permit it. It must be said that the apparatus of the Curia tried for quite some time, and without success, to forbid the pontiff a sport to which he was truly devoted.

Patriarch Kirill is also a downhill skier, and his record is no shorter: he learned to ski as a boy outside Leningrad, on Voronya Gora, and continued the pursuit in the seventies in the Swiss Alps, during his Geneva posting. In the 2010s Lukashenko related that Patriarch Kirill comes to ski on the Belarusian slopes. Leonid Tyagachev, former president of the Russian Olympic Committee, mentioned that the patriarch is a very fine downhill skier and performs professional tricks at a high level.

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_20712@04-06-2026_09-31-45.jpg)