Christmas has only just begun.
At least in several orthodox communities in Frankfurt, where the birth of Christ is celebrated on January 6th and 7th: with hour-long liturgies, with Christmas trees and burned oak wood, with the breaking of the fast, singing and prayers in different languages.
Because many Christian Eastern Churches of the Byzantine rite have stuck to the counting of the days for more than 2000 years, which was already valid at the birth of Christ: the Julian calendar.
Pope Gregory XIII
However, in 1582 a new calendar named after him was introduced, eliminated 10 days and changed the regulation of leap days, which is why most Christians in Central Europe celebrated Christmas in December.
Monica Ganster
Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
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In the Coptic-Orthodox community in Frankfurt, which is considered the oldest and largest in Germany, the faithful have been preparing for the high festival for four weeks with a fasting period in which they eat only vegan food.
On Friday evening, Father Maurice Bassili will again address his congregation in three languages: Coptic, the original language of the Egyptians, Arabic and German.
"We want to maintain the tradition of Coptic, but also reach as many as possible," says Bassili, who mainly welcomes people with Egyptian, Syrian and Iraqi roots in the St. Markus Church on Lötzener Straße in Bockenheim.
If you want to get an impression of it, you can also follow the church services on YouTube.
There you can also see the iconostasis, a wall decorated with icons,
which traditionally stands between the sanctuary and the congregation in the orthodox churches, explains Bassili.
The fact that Christ's birth will be celebrated later in his church is only a question of the calendar, there is no dogma associated with it, he emphasizes: "We have the same Bible, the same teaching".
War casts shadows on the festival
The Serbian Orthodox community, which Archpriest Simon Turkic says has 3,000 to 4,000 families, meets on Friday evening and Saturday morning in their church in Gallus.
The celebration, held in Serbian, also traditionally includes badnjak, a piece of oak wood that is burned, symbolically reminiscent of the wood that warmed the barn in Bethlehem and figuratively representing the warmth that Jesus brought to the people.
Dijana Avdic, herself a Serbian-Orthodox and on the board of the local foreigners' representation, pushed the idea of networking the communities and celebrating an Orthodox Christmas.
On Monday they are expecting around 180 guests in the Historical Museum, who are supposed to show the large number of these Christian communities in the city.
Avdic estimates that up to 50,000 people belong to Orthodox communities in the Rhine-Main area, including Romanians, Greeks, Egyptians, Georgians, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Syrians, Ukrainians and Russians.
Avdic hopes that the event should also send a signal for peace.
Everyone who works for democracy, the rule of law and human rights is welcome.
Invitations to the Russian Consulate and the Russian Orthodox Church have not been sent out, but individuals from the community are welcome
The war also overshadows the Orthodox Christmas celebrations.
More and more congregations in Ukraine want to break with the tradition of celebrating the high festival together with the Russian Orthodox Church of Patriarch Cyril, who approves of the war against Ukraine.
Priest Petro Bokanov, who heads the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Frankfurt, is also familiar with these discussions.
He too would have liked to have celebrated the birth of Christ two weeks earlier, but there was no place available on Christmas Eve.
Because the community uses the Catholic Church of St. Dionysius in Sindlingen for their services.
From December 2023, Bokanov hopes, a solution will be found.
For him, the Christmas festival, says the priest, is above all the event of the birth of Christ and not tied to a fixed day.
"It's the victory of light over dark times, a celebration of hope," Bokanov describes it.
And immediately adds: "It's also celebrated at the front".
The community in Frankfurt has grown significantly with the arrival of thousands of war refugees, but it is also constantly changing because people are leaving the emergency shelters and moving within the city, but also within Germany.
Bokanov himself will hold services in four cities from Mannheim to Frankfurt in the coming days and if he could share, he would have liked to fulfill even more requests.
The significance of which was not recognized in the West for a long time was the caesura that marked the occupation of Crimea by Russian troops in 2014.
Since then there has been radio silence between the Ukrainian and the Russian Orthodox community in Frankfurt.
Archpriest Dimitri Graf Ignatiew has presided over the Russian-Orthodox community, which will be celebrating in Bad Homburg and Frankfurt, since 1974.
Three-hour masses are planned there in the mornings and evenings.
His community includes mostly Russians, but also Ukrainians, Moldovans and a few Germans.
When asked about the war, the 88-year-old archpriest goes a long way. He can effortlessly tell the story of the neighboring nations garnished with dates, a story of solidarity – but also of repeated battles, land grabs, border shifts.
The ties between the countries are reflected in Count Ignatiev's own family history: his mother had Ukrainian-Polish roots, his father Tatar-Russian roots.
The hatred that prevails on both sides today is the worst and will probably prevent a rapprochement for a long time.
For Christmas he hopes for peace "that Christians have been preaching for 2000 years and are unable to keep".