Since last year, we have been describing the show with the “appointment of a new Crimean metropolitan” Tikhon (Shevkunov), both in the context of the Kremlin’s desire to strengthen control over the peninsula’s collaborators, preparing the corresponding “purges”, and as part of the “behind the altar” struggle for the Moscow patriarchal throne.
In November, we wrote about Tikhon’s announcement of the relocation of the “Tauride Theological Seminary” from Simferopol to Sevastopol, to the occupiers “new-made” buildings on the site of the ruins of Tauride Chersonesos.
We stated that, despite all the criminal assurances of the “Simferopol seminary” and its “seminarians” of loyalty to the occupiers, the Kremlin is striving to get rid of any manifestations of “unreliability” on the peninsula, even the most timid and inconsistent, and this is what Tikhon decided to play on own “media solitaire” last year.
Now, apparently, Tikhon has received the final go-ahead from the Kremlin to transfer the seminary, which, by the way, he personally headed as “rector”, displacing the “transitional regime” in the form of Archpriest Dmitry Gotskalyuk.
The “seminary” is planned to be located at the “newly created” literally in February “St. Vladimir’s Monastery of Chersonesos”, the “holy archimandrite” of which, and “as an exception”, is the same Tikhon.
The “supervisor” of the “monastery” is his former subordinate, “procured” by Tikhon from Pskov, hieromonk Hilarion (Karandeev) from the Pskov-Pechersk Theological Seminary, and another Pskov hieromonk, Andrey (Korotkov), will be responsible for the “seminary”.
Let us note, that the now finally decided move of the “seminary” hastily began to be “justified” by the Crimean collaborators, who quickly “changed their shoes on the fly” after the Kremlin position was deflated. At the same time, among the “professors of the seminary”, the “mainland” Archimandrite Silouan (Pasenko), who was the rector of the St. Nicholas Naval Cathedral of Kherson until 2022 , emerged in the role of “head of the department”.
Among Tikhon’s “new Crimean friends”, active collaborators – Yevpatoria Archpriest Georgy Dick and his Saki “colleague” Archpriest John Pristinsky – are also striving to get “grain places” in the “Sevastopol seminary”.
And on the part of the aggressor’s foreign intelligence, the “vice-rector of the seminary” Roman Bliznyakov, who has also been working for the last year as the “head of the Crimean branch” of the “Imperial Orthodox Palestinian Society”, has been drawn into this project; it is obvious that it is he who will try to implement external provocations under the guise of the “seminary”.
