On 2 of June this year 2011, our Bulgarian Orthodox Church has marked one more bright feast (one of the 12 chief (God’s) feasts).
The Spiritual Joy is great as our Saviour has Ascended to Heaven 40 days after his Glorious Resurrection in front of the amazed desciples, and crowd of people who were with them.
An Angel has also told the people testifing our Lord’s ascension that the Second Coming of our saviour will take place in the same manner as his Ascension.
Here is some passages from the Gospel of Luke 24:50-53
50 Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them.
51 hile he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven.
52 And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy,
53 and were continually in the temple blessing God.
It’s a tradition in some Orthodox Churches that the Paschal Greeting (Christ is Risen / Hristos Voskrese / Hristos Anesti etc.) is substituted with the greeting: Christ has ascended by the person greeting, while the respondant confirms answering with Truly he has ascended
This Ascension greeting is not that deeply routed among Christians as the Pashcal greeting, though it’s very truthful and beautiful, to use it instead of the standard daily Hi greeting 😉
The whole following week after Ascension’s feast has been arranged by the Church to be a feast week commemorating our Lord Christ’s glorious Ascension (in his glorified body) to Heaven and sit in the right hand of God.
There is a local village hear in Bulgaria near a village called Spasovo – Saviour’s which has a Church called The Ascension of Christ
In this small village there is a spring which does start flowing only on the date of the Ascension (celebrated on a different date every single year)!!! That’s amazing God miracle given to strengthen our faith as a confirmation that the Ascension of God’s Son and our saviour Christ is a real event that happened!
There is a false belief seriously accepted in many non-devoted Orthodox Christians who does not know well the Orthodox Christian faith, that on the date of The Ascension the so called Spasov Den (in Bulgarian) – Day of the Saviour , the dead who are in heaven and hell are allowed to get out of Heaven or Hell (for a temporary break) and be a bit closer to the living. Many people who believe this insanity instead of visiting a Church and being joyful for the Ascension of Our saviour do go to the city graves and spends few hours, crying or remembering the dead … This kind of believe is firmly non-orthodox and is taken from ancient paganism beliefs.
With all this said I find it important to say few words on why the Lord Jesus Christ has ascended?
The answer to this question gives Christ himself, as he says in the Gospel of John – Chapter 16
7 Nevertheless I tell you the truth;
It is expedient for you that I go away:
for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you;
but if I depart, I will send him unto you.
Here is a part of the Troparion for Ascension that is being sing in the Church:
When You fulfilled the dispensation for our sake,
and united earth to heaven:
You have Ascended in Glory, oh Christ our God
not being parted from those who love You,
but remaining with them and crying:
I am with you, and no one will be against you!
Kolya is the first Czech movie, I see. The movie is really good and I would classify it as a really art movie. It also bears the sad melancholic atmosphere that we hold on the Balkans. The movie might be a hard to grasp one for Western people but would definitely be easily understand by someone who lived in the realms of the USSR. The movie is also a movie that presents realities of the decaying communism, the times before the year of the fall the Berlin Wall (1989). What was really worthy and edifying for myself was the sad realities of a falling Union (a false idealistic empire built for more than half a century).
The movie starts with the main actor Louka, a middle-aged Czech man dedicated to music (a cellist funeral crematorium orchestra player and a self-employed cello instructor). Louka has one major muse which helps him follow his music career, the pursuit of new love and sexual relations with woman. As the situation with falling-communism is harsh and the economic in the Soviet Union is in downturn this kind of trend is even more seriously felt among people who are in art like Louka. Most of the movie is happening in Golden Prague (One of the most beautiful cities in the world IMHO).
Louka is working a couple of part time jobs next to his music career in the orchestra in order to be able to pay his daily life and bills, one of his other ways to get extra cash is the gravestone inscriptions.
Even though Louka is trying hard to earn money to pay back his loans and get a normal living, he is unsuccessful in getting enough money to make a decent living. Suddenly he gets into huge debts which he is not able to pay with his earned money. As Louka is single he is offered by one of his debtors to earn money by a small cheat (a false marriage) with a Russian woman who needs Czech citizenship in order to be able to later travel freely to the western part of Europe. He is offered 30 000 of Czech crons which for that time is a really solid money, which will allow him to pay back his loans and even get a small car Trabant !
Even though Louka tries his best to resist the temptation to do the criminal marriage at certain point the offered money convince him to accept the offering and he merries the young Russian fictiously. As marriages of this type are quite common in Czech in this days of communism decay, he lives with the promise by the Russian woman family that they will get divorced after 6 months time.
Louka gets married and gets his money, but just a 2 weeks later the Russian young lady emigrates in Germany to her German lover and leaves her young Russian boy Kolya behind under the care of her old mother. The old mother being unable to accept the sudden escape of her young Russian daughter, gets insane and enters into a mental hospital. Since Kolya (who speaks only Russian and has not even basic knowledge of Czech) does not a family to be placed in he is being brought to the apartment of his (father in law) Louka.
Louka enters into an unexpected hardships, where the policy could chase him for the illeagal fictious marriage and even worser with a foreign Russian child. He has never before had any experience with children, so initially he faces the hell of taking care for a child. To make things even worser the babushka (mentally unstable grandmother) of Kolya passes away after a heart attack in the Mental hospital. Now Louka is the only “relative” who according to Czech law has to take care for the 5 year old kid Kolya ! The child suffers from suspected meningitis and has to be placed on a course of carefully monitored antibiotics. Louka is threatened with imprisonment for his suspect marriage …
The movie is a serious drama but is a really touching one as it presents the power of love and how love can change human lives as Louka’s gradual love for Kolya changes him for good. Kolya is a wonderful piece of art movie and a real achievement for Czech cinema. Since it’s the first Czech movie I see I want to see a lot of more. In the mean time just watch the movie as it’s a wonderful piece of all-time movie classic.
Here are the pictures of the holy relics which were temporary sojourned in Pomorie’s Monastery for veneration in the the period 04.05.2011 – 14.05.2011.
It’s been like a tradition that the monastery is blessed with having a different saints holy relics on the Monastery feast day (St. George’s day).
This year the holy relics the good tradition by God’s grace was continued as the holy relics of the saints:
Saint Great Martyr George
Saint Venerable Macrina
Saint Marina
Saint Cyprian and Saint Justina
were for veneration in the Monastery Church called also Saint Great Martyr George / Sveti Velikomachenik Georgi
Here are the pictures of the holy relics I was able to obtain:
Saint Great Martyr George hand holy relics Saint Venerable Macrina Holy Relics (hand bone) Saint Cyprian and Justina Holy relics Saint Martyr Marina Holy relics There were also few other particles of saints which are permanently in the Pomorie monastery and christian pilgrims can freely go there to venerate them so I would not post pictures of this holy relics here.
What is really striking is that all the Holy relics had a very specific odor (similar to Roses) but as the monk Father Sergii said (an Odor not of this world). God’s grace can be felt with one’s spiritual heart when he is near the holy relics of this great saints, the monk father Sergii also told me that the reason for the odor is that God testifies in through the odor that the holy relics belong to his holy saints. Each saint holy remains had a different (parfume like) odor, it’s really amazing and hard to believe if you don’t smell it yourself but I have smelled the scent myself, the almost 15th century old bones (miraculously preserved by today) emits a specific beautiful odor. The preservation of this holy relics for all this centuries is another great miracle of God, as any normal not hermetically preserved bone kept for veneration for all this years would have decayed by so far, however this saints relics are obviously not! As you can see truly Great is God in his saints! Glory be to the Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit now and forever and ever. Amen!
I needed a handy way to recover some old data of an expired domain containing a website, with some really imprtant texts. The domains has expired before one year and it was not renewed for the reason that it’s holder was not aware his website was gone. In the meantime somebody registered this domain as a way to generate ads profit from it the website was receiving about 500 to 1000 visitors per day. Now I have the task to recover this website permanently lost from the internet data. I was not able to retrieve anything from the old domain name be contained via google cache, yahoo cache, bing etc. It appears most of the search engines store a cached version of a crawled website for only 34 months. I’ve found also a search engine gigablast which was claimed to store crawled website data for 1 year, but unfortunately gigablast contained not any version of the website I was looking for.Luckily (thanks God) after a bit of head-banging there I found a website that helped me retrieve at least some parts from the old lost website.
The Wayback Machine , guys keeps website info snapshots of most of the domain names on the internet for a couple of years back, here is how wayback machine website describes its own provided services:
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine puts the history of the World Wide Web at your fingertips.
Another handy feature wayback machine provides is checking out how certain websites looked like a couple of years before, let’s say you want to go back in the past and see how yahoo’s website looked like 2 years ago.
Just go to web.archive.org and type in yahoo and select a 2 years old website snapshot and enjoy 😉
It’s really funny how ridiculous many websites looked like just few years from now 😉
It is the second year I take the time to come for a pilgrimage in Pomorie’s Monastery st. great Martyr George (Georgi).<</b>
I’m named after the great Christian saint (It’s my Name day today :)!) and I do wanted to receive a spiritual blessing here in the monastery.
The believing Orthodox Christians this year could receive a spiritual blessing this year from the Monastery as some of the Holy Relics of many great saints are temporary in the monastery for the Monastery’s feast day which is the day we commemorate our great Orthodox Christian martyr saint Georgi.
It’s unique that this year by God’s grace the monastery has temporary received a small particle of the holy relics of st. George. The pilgrims could come here and does venerate the great saint martyrs for which I thank God for being allowed by his providence to be here in the monastery and venerate the holy relics.
Here are few photos of the Holy relics from the monastery, on the pictures you see the holy relics of Saint Cyprian & St. Justina on the right, st. George’s holy relics in the center and st. Macrina’s holy relics on the left.
On the picture above you see the Abbot of Pomorie monastery Father Ierotei (who is a truly great father and a wonderful spirited man !) with the holy relics (bones) of saint Macrina on his left.
On this last picture you can see the holy relics of the Pomorie’s monastery embedded into icons (the two icons on the right).
I thank God for blessing me with being here in this holy cloister and blessing me with being able to venerate the holy martyrs relics and through this bless me and strengthen me.!
It’s important to say that we the orthodox Christians had the tradition to venerate our saint holy remains as a way to venerate God himself in accordance to the holy bible psalm which says Great and Glorious is God in his saints!
I’m sorry to provide my readers with this bad quality pictures, I’ll try to put some better quality pictures of the holy remains in very short time. Being able to show this holy remains to other orthodox christian brother and sisters is also a great grace and blessing which by God’s grace was given to us the sinners! Just to close I’ll say glory be to our God – The Holy Trinity now and forever and ever amen!
It’s the third day, after the saviour’s tomb was found empty. The third day after the evel living has manifested his divinity by showing himself alive to The Holy Virgin Mary (Theotokos) to Mary Magdalene and to few of the Holy Apostles. The upcoming week is called within the Church The Bright Week The whole week is a week of a divine spiritual joy which we all the Christians experiens (feels).
God is really graceful to us the sinners in this holy days of the year.
“Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on those in the tombs bestowing life!”
Happy Easter to all my beloved readers. In relation to the Greatest feast of all times I wish to all my readers a lot of good health, a lot of success in all good, and a lot of love. Rejoice for the Lord and Saviour of mankind has been risen!
In Jerusalem the Holy Fire has descended from Heaven. For all Unorthodox Christians, it’s important to note that the Holy Fire is the miracle confirming that the Christian Orthodox faith is the true ancient Christian faith in fulness!
Each year the Holy Fire descends from heaven and lights up the candle of the Patriarch of the Jerusalem Church. This only happens on the Orthodox Easter! This is without question a great miracle and a very graceful act by which God shows us he has not left us behind.
Here is a video you can watch, where you can see the miracle happening as well as a discussion, is really the miracle real:
Miracle of the Holy Fire in the Holy Sepulchre (Jesus’s Tomb) in Jerusalem – Easter 2011
Holy Light (Holy Fire) in Jerusalem: Proofs & Testimonies
During the three days in which, we the Christians celebrate the glorious Resurrection of our Lord and Saviour. It’s accepted that the ordinary “Hi” or “Hello” greeting we use daily, is ex-changed for “Christ is Risen!” 🙂
The word “Easter” used for the Resurrection 3 day feasts is also interesting as it comes from “Eastern” – (e.g. Eastern Orthodox Church) 🙂
Today, a day before the suffering of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ for our sins remission we do commemorate the day of the Last Supper or (The Supper of Mysteries) in the Orthdox Church.
According to our Church tradition today is the day on which the saviour has established the Church mystery of the Sacrements! (Eucharist)
Here are the exact passages from (Matthew 26:26-28), where by the word of the Lord the Eucharist was established:
“Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’ And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.'” (Mt. 26:26-28)
The feast is celebrated with a morning Holy Liturgy among all Eastern Orthodox Churches around the world. It’s common that many layman do confess and take the sacraments on this date.
Before sacraments are received we the layman confess our unworthiness for Christ and beg for him to make us worthy to receive the communion with the prayer:
I believe, O Lord, and I confess that Thou art truly the Christ, the Son of the Living God, who camest into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first (see 1 Tim 1:15).
I believe also that this is truly Thine own most pure Body, and that this is truly Thine own most precious Blood. Therefore I pray Thee: Have mercy upon me and forgive me my transgressions, committed in word and deed, whether consciously or unconsciously.
And make me worthy to partake without condemnation of Thy most pure Mysteries, for the remission of sins and unto life everlasting.
Of Thy Mystical Supper, O Son of God, accept me today as a communicant. For I will not speak of Thy Mystery to Thine enemies, neither like Judas will I give Thee a kiss; but like the thief will I confess Thee: “Remember me, O Lord, in Thy Kingdom.”
May the communion of Thy Holy Mysteries be neither to my judgment, nor to my condemnation, 0 Lord, but to the healing of soul and body.
This prayer is actually said everytime before we do take the sacraments through the year, so it’s one of the most-important prayers in our Orthodox Church life.
The Holy Communion establishment is also an act of remembrance a of the Lord’s suffering for the remission of our sins according to his commandment.
One major difference between Orthodoxy and Protestanism concerning Eucharist is that we orthodox believe that by taking the sacraments, we do receive the Most-holy flesh and blood of Christ and through his blood and flesh, the damage sin has created in our hearts, minds and souls (which is forgiven by God in the the mystery of the confessment) is being recovered completjely.
Hereby in this article I’ll in short give you a quick way to install a number of my favourite linux games. In my view the games I’m going to suggest for installation are actually among the best existent games you could install and play on a Linux Desktop today.
Many people say/believe Linux does not have games, or the games for Linux/BSD are not fully featured and are not comparable to the ones for Windows, most of this sayings and beliefs are actually a fairy tales. I should admit of course that Linux is still lacking behind in its gaming capabilities, even quite behind any Windows platform (Don’t get me wrong, I’m trying to be as much realistic as possible here in my estimation).
However little by little year by year as time passes by with time the situation for the coming generation of Linux Gamers is gettings better and better!. The amount of free and non-free games is rising day by day, wheter many of the large game producing companies like Blizzard, ID Software etc. are producing ports of their proprietary games for Linux.
Along with that the amount of Linux Enthusiast gamers and hobbyist is constantly increasing.
At the present moment probably there are more than 5000 games for Linux! Many of that games count still requires heavy testing or are not yet production ready and therefore they don’t make it as a packages in the general Linux distributions repositories. These games are instead published on a various websites across the internet and still needs our (the linux hobbyist and daily users) testing and support Linux has a number of websites which aims at inform interested users into the Linux games development, the major ones as far as I have found are:
http://happypenguin.org
http://www.linux-gamers.net
In Debian (Squeeze) Linux currently there are an overall of 1815 free and non-free games packages to available for installation I have a favourite number of games I do install on each and every computer I use as a desktop workstation.
These Linux games are truly a blessing especially in times I’m too tired of reading, scripting or being too overwhelmed of doing my daily system administration duties.
To install my selected games collection on your Debian, Ubuntu or any other debian based Linux with apt-get use the command: debian:~# apt-get install open-invaders bsdgames-nonfree scummvm
briquolo abuse abuse-frabs dosbox pingus wesnoth brutalchess
dreamchess gnuchess kamefu frozen-bubble bomberclone
lbreakout2 armagetron defendguin dodgindiamond2
rocksndiamonds blobwars wing xgalaga
extremetuxracer planetpenguin-racer
powermanga sauerbraten supertux tecnoballz torus-trooper
trackballs tumiki-fighters zblast-x11 criticalmass xbill
viruskiller snowballz freedoom wormux bugsquish gtetrinet njam
starfighter prboom bb xsoldier xevil gnome-breakout xarchon
moon-lander trophy lincity-ng alienblaster scorched3d ltris
smc foobillard warsow tremulous glest warzone2100 matanza
ace-of-penguins
I have created a small script containing the same apt-get, so I would advice you if you’re keen on Linux gaming like me to use it for yourself and for all your friends who runs Linux. Download my turn-linux-into-gamestations.sh script here
If you want to install the Linux games list with the turn-linux-into-gamestation.sh use cmds:
Along with the game desciptions in my recommended games to install description you are about to find also the size of each of the games and the repository filename of the package that installs a games or relates to the linux game.
To extract the games descriptions I have used apt-cache
Here is the exact apt-cache show comman in combination with a little shellscript loop I have used to generate the games desciption file of my favourite Linux games list: for i in $(echo open-invaders bsdgames-nonfree scummvm briquolo abuse abuse-frabs dosbox pingus wesnoth brutalchess dreamchess gnuchess kamefu frozen-bubble bomberclone lbreakout2 armagetron defendguin dodgindiamond2 rocksndiamonds blobwars wing xgalaga extremetuxracer planetpenguin-racer powermanga sauerbraten supertux tecnoballz torus-trooper trackballs tumiki-fighters zblast-x11 criticalmass xbill viruskiller snowballz freedoom wormux bugsquish gtetrinet njam starfighter prboom bb xsoldier xevil gnome-breakout xarchon moon-lander trophy lincity-ng alienblaster scorched3d ltris smc foobillard warsow tremulous glest warzone2100); do apt-cache show $i |grep -v "Priority:" |grep -v "Section:" |grep -v "Maintainer:" |grep -v "Depends:" |grep -v "Architecture:"|grep -v "SHA1:" |grep -v "SHA256:"|grep -v "Recommends:"|grep -v "MD5sum:" >>games_description.txt;
done
Note that some of the games will require a properly configured opengl / glx configured and will require a bit more solid system hardware in order be able to play some of the games.
Also some of games from my linux favor game list are space demanding, some of the games will require (up to about 300mb of space).
Nevertheless as I presume nowdays most Linux desktops runs some no more than 3, 4 years old hardware I assume the minimal hardware requirements necessery to be able to run and play all the games from the above list won’t be a problem.
On my system all of my selected linux games collection runs without any performance issues, though some of the games has some minor sound problems (for some weird uknown to me reasons).
I’m using an ordinary Thinkpad R61 notebook with a Debian Squeeze 6.0 installation with Gnome on my desktop. My basic hardware parameters which runs all the linux games smoothly are as follows: Notebook Thinkpad R61 with
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8Ghz Memory: 2GB HDD: 160GB
To start up and play the games in a Gnome desktop look up for the games in gnome menus:
Application -> Debian -> Games or
Application -> Games
If you want to only install only the games which will surely run on lower computer hardware let’s say with: CPU Pentium 166~300 Mhz and some lower amount of memory like 128MB of memory or 128 mbytes of system memory, I would suggest you run the apt-get command:
There is a miracle of incorruptable holy relics (Incorruptable Bodies) of many of our Orthodox Saints in the Orthodox Church. Little or none is actually known in the non-orthodox christian realm about this great miracle proof of the truthfulness of our faith.
The incorruptability of saints has been a phenomena longly known to exist, some of the incorruptable bodies of saints are still preserved already for more than 10 centuries.
The phenomenon of incorruptable bodies is a sure sign for saintship in the Church. There are dozens of orthodox christian saints whose bodies are still intact. Our Orthodox Church teaches that the incorruptability of the saints body is given by God’s grace for all us the believers as a confirmation of the Resurrection of the Dead, which is about to come in the Great day of the Lord as the scriptures teaches.
A good example for incorruptable body which exists for 10 centuries in the bulgarian lands are the incorruptable holy body of St. John of Rila. St. John of Rila is the greatest known Bulgarian saint also officially recognized by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church as the patron saint of Bulgaria (protector of all Bulgaria).
In below’s videos I present you the antiphon of St. John of Rila:
Antiphon translated to English means (Song of Praise) dedicated to some Christian saint and is actually an Orthodox well-known Church term.
Saint John’s incorruptable bodies is still kept in his established monasteryThe Rila Monastery . Each year on the saints feast his incorruptable body is being bringed out of the monastery for a procession around the Church monastery.
On that day all the pilgrims who are looking for St. John’s spiritual intercession in front of God (The Holy Trinity) are lined up to venerate the great God servant St. John of Rila.
Unfortunately there is no video that has video-taped the incorruptable body of Saint John of Rila. However there are plenty of videos which shows a lot of incorruptable bodies of saints some of which are even Roman Catholic.
Along with the saints bodies incorruptability, many of the saints bodies does emit a specific a flower like odor, nevertheless the body is a thousands of years old.
Here is an example of a saints remains which is considered incorruptable, his body is preseved for more than 60 years without any special chemical threatment.
What is most important is many believers does receive a spiritual blessing or get healed from various spiritual or bodily diseases, when they look up for the holy intercession of the saint, who has been honoured by God with incorruptableness.
Before a saint’s body is recognized as a saint and his body as incorruptable, usually there are testimonials by christian layman for healings by his holy prayers during his earthly living. Some of the saints which are found to have incorruptable bodies has happened after a few years they have been put in a normal earthly grave. In holy mount athos there is a tradition that (if I remember correctly 5 years) after a monk’s death and burial, his grave is being digged out to collect his remains and put it in a ossuary.
After this 5 years some of the holy monks remains are found to possess this miraculous graceful incorruptable bodies.
As we know from Holy Bible, the body is the temple of the holy spirit my logical interpretation of some of the saint’s incrorruptability is rooted in there saint’s way of living as they have achieved the Holy Spirit (The Spirit of God) in an immeasurable quantities that, the Spirit of Truth that’s being flowing out from their incorruptable bodies is still sustaining the body and prevents the natural laws to destroy it.
The bodily incorruptabilities of our Orthodox saints is also a clear sign for the truthfulness of Orthodox Christian faith. The incorruptability is also a direct violation of the natural laws by God’s great providence and mercy and I guess is given as a stimulator of us whose faith in our saviour Jesus Christ and in God the Holy Trinity – The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit, to whom be glory now and forever and ever Amen!
Saint Great Martyr George hand holy relics
Saint Venerable Macrina Holy Relics (hand bone)
Saint Cyprian and Justina Holy relics
Saint Martyr Marina Holy relics
