Documentary visit in Macedonia

Between the 17^th and the 18^th of June 2009, a documentary visit was organized in Macedonia. Radu Preda and Nicolae Turcan were the guests of the Most Reverent Stephen, Archbishop of Ohrid, Metropolitan of Skopje and Primate of the Orthodox Church in Macedonia. Accompanied by the personal secretary of the Most Reverent Stephen, Dr. Gjoko Gjorgjevski, the Romanian guests had several meetings and visited, among others, the old citadel of Ohrid, monasteries with tradition or new-organized ones. Separated from the Orthodox Church of Serbia in 1967, having the title of a country unacknowledged as such by Greece, the Church of Macedonia is, in the words of the Most Reverent Stephen, “the sad illustration of the lack of principiality from the part of the modern Orthodoxy”. The fact that the autonomy of this local Orthodox Church, having an impressive liturgical and iconographical tradition, a limes between the Christian and the Muslim world, is not recognized, truly represents a big question mark for ecclesiology and canonic law, a challenge and, at the same time, a chance.