The visits to the Church of Saint Theodore, the great martyr of the VII century, and the Basilica of Saint Clement, where the tomb of Saint Cyril is located, have opened today the second last day of the trip of the archbishop of Athens and all Greece, Christodoulos, in Rome. In Saint Theodore’s, a church that has been designated for liturgical use by the Greek-Orthodox community of Rome, the archbishop met the exarch of Northern Europe, the metropolitan bishop Gennadios of Italy, through whom he greeted "all the Orthodox communities of Venice, Trieste, Milan, Genoa, Turin, Bologna, Parma, Pavia, Rimini, Reggio, Padova, Ferrara and Florence", thanking him for his warm hospitality and giving him a bishop’s pectoral and a cross. Then, Christodoulos went to the Church of Saint Clement, where he stopped and prayed on the tomb of Saint Cyril, whose missionary work with brother Methodius he recalled. "Through their work and their contribution he said , the invention of an alphabet, they helped the Balkan peoples to develop in accordance with the ecclesial principles, the tradition and the spirituality of Eastern Christianity".
