MOSCOW, August 7 (Itar-Tass) - A veneration cross was placed on Tuesday in Butovo city district in southern Moscow, a former Butovo Range of NKVD secret police, where 20,000 people were killed during Great Terror tide ordered by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1937.
The foundation for the across are stones that have been brought from Solovets Islands, one of the deadliest concentrations camps, as well as stones from destroyed Christian Orthodox churches.
The cross was mounted without the use of any machinery, but by the old expedient of ropes that tens of believers pulled to put it in place near the Church of New Martyrs.
The 12-meter wooden cross was brought by a sacred procession on the river barge on the Volga-Baltiisk Canal, most of which was built by people convicted in Stalin repressions on the “political article”.
Moscow met its with bell toll.
During the night to Tuesday, the cross was moved on the Moskva River past the Cathedral of Christ the Savior that blown up by the Bolsheviks in the1930s and restored a decade ago, and was then taken to the New Savior Monastery, where a night vigil was held.
After that the cross was delivered to Butovo.
Masters of the Solovets Monastery worked on the cross for five months.
It is made of cedar and pine.
“It is difficult to find a place where so much saints gathered,” the Father Superior of the New Martyrs Monastery, Reverend Kirill, said.
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