Ecclesiastical and diplomatic serving of Metropolitan John (Wendland) in Syria and Lebanon in 1959
The article contains a detailed chronological description of the external political conditions, as well as the internal and external Church situation in the USSR and the Middle East at the turn of 1958-1959, in which the future Metropolitan of Yaroslavl and Rostov, as well as the Bishop of Podolsk, John (Wendland), served in the Church and diplomatic service. The content of the article is based on materials from various documentary complexes, especially valuable of which are sources of personal origin - six letters of Bishop John to his spiritual father, Archbishop Guriy (Egorov) from the personal archive of his spiritual daughter, journalist E.L. Mezhennaya. Unpublished documents of the State archive of the Russian Federation and the articles and essays in the «Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate» are also valuable material in terms of building the entire chronology of events.