Archbishop Joan clarifies the involvement of the Orthodox Church in the Kosina incident

2025-10-23 09:15:00, Aktualitet CNA

Archbishop Joan clarifies the involvement of the Orthodox Church in the Kosina

Archbishop Joan, in an interview with journalist Blendi Fevziu on the "Opinion" show, responded to the sensational event in Kosina regarding the exhumation of the remains of residents as Greek soldiers in 2006 and explained the role of the Church in this story.

The Archbishop said that they do not know how involved the local priest was in this event, but the priest must be present at the exhumation as he has an obligation, just like a doctor who heals even an enemy.

His Beatitude Joan said that KOASH was not initially clear about what was happening and the involvement was a mistake, but the service is mandatory.

Fevziu : The breaking of Archbishop Anastasios in relation to the media was the issue of the bones of Kosina, where the bones of some local residents of the villages of Përmet, not through the fault of the Church, although the relatives themselves took and sold their bones to Greek soldiers. At that time, the Church did not keep the necessary distance from such a thing because the bones of the persons exhumed from the graves were the bones of Albanian Orthodox.

Archbishop Joan: The church was not clear from the beginning what had happened to those people. They had not been reconciled by the church, it was a program of the Greek government to gather them.

The mistake was that the church got involved in these things, but the priest at every exhumation must be there to perform the service, it is a mandatory part, whoever the person is exhumed and today when someone is exhumed we perform a short service and when they are reburied and moved somewhere else in the service we perform it. I don't know the extent to which he was involved in other things, but this was not from the church. That the local priest should have been, it should have been that even today if he is an Orthodox Christian and wants a service we are obliged to do it, like the work of a doctor. The doctor and the priest have the same thing, whoever is wounded and the wounded enemy must heal him. The priest also performs the service, the service is not a decoration it is an obligation, it is a prayer./ CNA