First Church in memory of deported people to be erected in Chisinau

The first Church in the ex-soviet space, in memory of deported people, will be erected in Chisinau. The Church will celebrate its feast on All Saints’ Day. The site where the church will be erected was blessed in a ceremony held on Tuesday, October 31. Leader of Association of Formerly Deported People, Valentina Sturza, told Info-Prim Neo that the ceremony of blessing the place on which the church will stand is an unforgettable moment for those who survived the ordeal of exile, as this is the place where hundreds of thousands of souls, expatriated and pushed like cattle to Siberia or Kazakhstan, will be prayed for. The idea of building the Church of All Saints belongs to father Ioan Baltag, priest of the Bassarabian Metropolis. It’s a pity though, said Valentina Strurza, that the monument dedicated to the victims of Stalin’s repressions wasn’t erected yet in front of the Train Station, the place where the ordeal began. She assumes that this happened because initially the monument was intended to bear the title “victims of the communist repressions”, reason for which it dropped out from the Municipal Council’s agenda. The exact figure of the people deported from Bassarabia, Bucovina and Hertsa County is not known. It is believed that almost 1.5 million people, about a half of Romanians from these lands, were subjected to exile. At present, out of those 300.000 survivors of the deportations en masse carried out by the communist soviet regime, only 9.000 are still alive, including 1.700 in Chisinau.