Historic confession on camera

“I light both oli lamps.”

I arrived in Jerusalem late on the evening of November 25. The next day, I contacted Archbishop Isidore and asked him to meet at the “Notre Dame” hotel, where I was staying. The appointment was set for 7 PM. Upon his arrival, we went up to the second floor, to the meeting room. I placed a camera in front of him and a digital audio recording device.

There, without any prior arrangement or agreement on what and how I would ask him, I proceeded with the first recorded, documentary testimony regarding how the “miracle of the Holy Fire” is created.

It was a little after 8 when I bid farewell to Isidore. He headed towards the old city. I, towards… nowhere. The intensity and the burden that the Archbishop of Hierapolis had placed on my shoulders were so great that I must have walked for hours in the – unknown to me – modern city. I had found and documented the truth, but I did not expect that the feeling I would experience would be alien to the words joy, victory, or “global exclusivity,” with all that it entails. Yes, the truth had liberated me from the tyranny of a “miracle” or, in simpler terms, a conundrum that violated my logic from my early youth, and furthermore, I saw it influencing and, primarily, fanaticizing millions of people. An absolute absurdity that bordered on intolerance, alien to Orthodoxy, alien to Christ. Alongside all this, I was thinking of the Hagiotaphites. Not only those who revealed the truth to me, but also those who refused to speak to me when I asked them the simple question: “Is it a miracle?” Even those who “advised” me not to reveal it. All of them.

Fear, habit, insecurity, and even the sense of uniqueness that stems from a “miracle” occurring in the sacred space they serve, are human weaknesses that call for understanding. And they have mine. Those who do not have it are the power-hungry and the professionals of deception. And the line begins with the cunning layman, who sells the “miracle” for financial gain, and extends to the highest echelons of the respective hierarchy, which draws immense power from it, within a framework of arrogance and unrestrained ambition. At the root of all this is falsehood. And in the end, behind all this, lurks insidiously the so-called religious charlatanism. The wound of Christianity and every religion.

All this I pondered during that evening walk. How the Brotherhood would emerge more united and stronger from the ordeal of the revelation, and how it would act as a bulwark against hypocrites and charlatans.

The morning of the next day, I met a good friend who had served as my advisor and guide on my three missions. He was deeply knowledgeable about ecclesiastical matters and the behind-the-scenes workings of the Patriarchate. I told him what had happened the previous day.
He was startled! “You have such material in your hands and you’re still here?” I didn’t understand. “What do you mean? And where should I go?” “You should return to Greece quickly,” he told me. And he continued: “What you have is an atomic bomb, and it’s best they don’t find out you have it until you publish it.”
“And if they find out, what will happen?” “They are capable of anything…” I interrupted him abruptly. “Do not continue. I refuse to accept that people who dedicated their lives to Jesus and to the protection of the Holy Shrines are capable of harming a person.”
He shook his head.

As it turned out, and as we will see later, some were determined to harm me.