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On the 25th of August 2023, the Romaïan Cultural Society, by recommendation of the Committee for Public Affairs Follow-up, addressed a letter to H.E. Mr. Antonio Guterres, secretary General of the United Nations, asking him to intervene to prevent the smuggling, the transfer, the sale, the purchase and the misappropriation of the treasures of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, and urging him to warn the actors about the consequences of continuing these illegal actions demanding that they put an end to them.
The Society wrote in this letter that “what is happening on the Ukrainian land is something we deeply regret. We specifically grieve and deplore the fall of human victims and the great destruction that affects people and land.” and added “ that the Romaïan Cultural Society looks with great sorrow at the sad events happening on this blessed land, considering our brotherhood with the Ukrainian people and our mutual Romaïan cultural and religious heritage. Ukraine, especially the city of Kiev, is the cradle of the Romaïan Christian evangelization of all the Slavic Russ peoples (Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians) and cuddles innumerable and priceless historical, religious and cultural treasures.”
“This war in Ukraine has become a sad opportunity for foreigners and creeps to intervene and increase the harm. We are especially concerned by the news that some organized gangs, in conditions of complete confusion and chaos, seize the relics of saints in churches and monasteries and steal their priceless treasures, which are of great value to the believers of the Orthodox Church in the entire Romaïan world. These treasures represent a large part of our history, conscience, faith, martyrs and values. We also learned about secret and public smuggling of these relics, treasures, and precious church assets outside Ukraine, hence moving them far from the places where they were located hundreds of years ago under the auspices of the Orthodox Church. The pretext of protecting them is totally misleading: they may have started to be sold, or they will later be offered for sale or misappropriated.”
The letter added “that the RCS will consider any grabbing, purchase, or illegal possession of these valuable church relics, treasures, tools, and utensils transferred from their original local Church, as a war crime for which each person involved will be pursued, whether he is the smuggler, the buyer, the seller or the seizer. The aforementioned have been the property of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine for hundreds of years and the property of the Romaïan Orthodox world to which we and the Ukrainians belong. They represent the conscience of this world, its history, its legacy, its present and its future.”