Today is the start of the third week of Great Lent, and we recall the words of the Serbian Patriarch Pavle on fasting

In the photograph: Patriarch Pavle (Stojčević) at the Ravanica Monastery in 1994.

Patriarch Pavle (1914-2009) is, perhaps, the most beloved hierarch of recent times among the Serbs. They say of him: that he has not yet been glorified among the saints is not his problem, but ours.

A man of strict life, he directed that strictness above all at himself. He held fasting to be obligatory for a Christian and criticised every attempt to turn it into something optional, "each person's choice". How can a man call himself a Christian if he is not prepared to sacrifice anything at all for Christ?

I found one recollection interesting: when a seminarian got drunk in a town kafana, the patriarch wrote to his teacher: you are showing him no mercy if you leave this unpunished; without punishment he will not mend his ways and will perish.

Fasting, Patriarch Pavle said, was commanded to people back in Paradise, handed down through Moses, and perfectly fulfilled by Christ. It is not a human institution, but a Divine one.

Report a translation error

At the close of the Strugatskys' "Roadside Picnic" the Golden Sphere is asked for this: "Happiness for everybody, free, and let nobody go away unsatisfied!" I do not promise to leave no one aggrieved, but the digest really does come free

At the close of the Strugatskys' "Roadside Picnic" the Golden Sphere is asked for this: "Happiness for everybody, free, and let nobody go away unsatisfied!" I do not promise to leave no one aggrieved, but the digest really does come free. So, here is the

Frederic Leighton

Frederic Leighton. “Daedalus and Icarus”, 1869 Daedalus warns his son not to climb too high: the heat of the sun may melt the wax, but Icarus is already gazing into the distance, and the lamentations of a foolish old man interest him not in the least

Today is the start of the third week of Great Lent, and we recall the words of the Serbian Patriarch Pavle on fasting

Read more

At the close of the Strugatskys' "Roadside Picnic" the Golden Sphere is asked for this: "Happiness for everybody, free, and let nobody go away unsatisfied!" I do not promise to leave no one aggrieved, but the digest really does come free

Frederic Leighton

Attempts to resolve the problems of many years of uncontrolled mass migration

Characters from Gogol's "Petersburg Tales" on the pedestal of the monument to Nikolai Gogol on Nikitsky Boulevard, photograph of the 1960s