As The New York Post reports these days, the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Nicholas–National Shrine, which falls under the jurisdiction of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, has decided to award this year’s traditional annual “Beacon of Hope” award to Volodymyr Zelensky. The church is located in the financial heart of New York, in Lower Manhattan, not far from the memorial center commemorating the victims of the September 11, 2001 tragedy. The present church was built on the site of the old church dating from 1916, which was demolished in 2001 because it stood in the immediate vicinity of the so-called Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
ZELENSKY — LIGHT AND HOPE?
The award to the head of the Kyiv regime will be presented on September 26 at the elite private club and hotel Casa Cipriani, located in one of the architectural and historical symbols of New York’s Manhattan — the Battery Maritime Building. The building itself is located in the immediate vicinity of the Greek Church of Saint Nicholas–National Shrine.
The invitation to the cocktail reception and gala dinner, at which Zelensky will receive the award and which will serve as a fundraising event, briefly outlines the rationale behind the choice of this year’s laureate. According to the members of the Board of Trustees of the church community at the Greek church in Manhattan, Zelensky has “inspired millions of people around the world through his unwavering leadership in defending freedom and human dignity.” As an example of “exceptional courage, determination and devotion to his people,” the statement cites his “iconic declaration at the beginning of the Russian invasion — I need ammunition, not a ride.” Since this year also marks 250 years since the founding of the United States and 25 years since the September 11 tragedy, the members of the Board of Trustees of the church community at the Greek church in Manhattan emphasized in the award invitation that it is being presented to “a leader who embodies the ideals of hope rising from darkness.” Finally, the Board of Trustees compared Zelensky, no less, to their own Saint Nicholas church, claiming that the current president of Ukraine “reflects its spirit” as a place where “faith, perseverance and the light of hope stand as a testimony to the world.”
The news that Vladimir Zelensky is being given some kind of award would hardly be worth a detailed analysis were it not for the fact that it brings together a series of circumstances that make crystal clear, above all on a deeply symbolic level, the true nature of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.
THE AWARD IN THE HANDS OF A PERJURER
The decision to grant the annual award of an Orthodox church to a man who is not even baptized in the Orthodox Church and who is, in this regard, a perjurer, because he broke a public promise to be baptized that he made when he was elected to office, was made by the Board of Trustees of the church community at this temple. The head of this body is Archbishop Elpidophoros (Lambriniadis), head of the American Archdiocese of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. He is regarded as the most serious candidate to succeed Bartholomew and is known as a prominent church modernist (for example, he was the first Orthodox bishop to baptize, in Athens in 2022 and without the blessing of the competent hierarch, two children of a homosexual couple who were born to surrogate mothers), an advocate of Eastern papism (his statement describing the Patriarch of Constantinople as the “first without equals” in universal Orthodoxy is well known), and of left-liberal ideology (for example, he participated in a Black Lives Matter march in 2020).
The spiritual leader of this Greek parish in Manhattan and a member of the Board of Trustees that decided to grant the aforementioned award to Zelensky is also the highly influential priest Father Alexander Karloutsos, who is regarded as a man extremely close to the American “deep state,” as well as to big business, particularly the pharmaceutical industry. And as something of a “Machiavelli” of the American Archdiocese of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, he was Bartholomew’s key figure in applying pressure at the Council of Crete.
THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE PHANAR AND WALL STREET
A member of the Board of Trustees who explained the decision to award Zelensky the prize to the New York Post with the words — we want to honor President Zelensky and the Ukrainian people for their struggle and to show solidarity — is the executive director of this body, Andrew Veniopoulos. He is one of the archons, that is, among the most influential laymen of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, who, according to his official Archon biography, was a key Phanar figure responsible for logistics at the Council of Crete, as well as for organizing the ecumenist and left-liberal “Peace Path” event on Lesbos, during which Patriarch Bartholomew, Pope Francis and Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens expressed support for migrants who had flooded the Greek islands at that time on their way to Europe.
The identity of another Phanar archon, who is vice chairman of the Board of Trustees of the church community at the Greek Church of Saint Nicholas National Shrine in Manhattan, clearly demonstrates the connection between the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and Wall Street. This is Michael Psaros, co-owner of the major American investment company KPS Capital Partners, LP, whose assets are estimated at $21 billion, and who served as treasurer of the American Archdiocese of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, where, among other things, he oversaw matters related to the construction of the Saint Nicholas National Shrine in Manhattan. At the 2025 donor gala dinner at Casa Cipriani, when 2 million dollars was raised from five hundred guests for the day-to-day operation (!) of the new Saint Nicholas National Shrine, Michael Psaros called this church in the heart of Wall Street the “American Parthenon” and America’s “Hagia Sophia,” dedicated to the “heroes” of September 11, 2001.
THE CHURCH IN MANHATTAN — A REFLECTION OF NATO ORTHODOXY
Incidentally, the new Church of Saint Nicholas National Shrine does not resemble an Orthodox church at all in its external appearance, because it was built in complete opposition to the canon of Orthodox architecture. In this regard, Father Pavel Florensky once said: “…a failure to understand ecclesiastical conservatism is at the same time a failure to understand artistic creativity. The canon has never served as an obstacle to the latter, and strict canonical forms in all fields of art have always been the whetstone on which the untalented were broken and genuine talents sharpened.” The syncretic architectural work of Santiago Calatrava, whose work is decisively influenced by Le Corbusier and Gaudí, is anything but an expression of the artistic canon of the Orthodox Church. On the contrary, its appearance is entirely consistent with Wall Street and its ideology of a melting pot that levels everything into nothingness. Given the ecumenical closeness between the primates of the “Old” and “New Rome,” Calatrava’s close ties with the Vatican were certainly a factor in his selection as the chief architect of the Greek church in Manhattan. Conspiracy theorists would probably find the connection between the famous Spanish architect and the papal curia in the fact that the Calatravans were a very powerful medieval Spanish Roman Catholic military religious order.
The liturgical essence of Calatrava’s architecturally syncretic work best confirms the accuracy of Father Pavel Florensky’s assessment that church art is true when it reflects the essential characteristic of the Church — that it is the “pillar and bulwark of Truth.” Namely, in this architecturally impersonal church, ecumenical prayers contrary to the fundamental Truth that Orthodox Christians confess at every Divine Liturgy — that the Church is one, holy, and catholic — are regularly held. For example, Father Samuel Davis, a priest of the Church of Saint Nicholas in Manhattan, who is visibly tattooed, even concelebrated last year with American Uniates. The Greek church in Manhattan is in fact a reflection of NATO Orthodoxy under the Eastern-Papist leadership of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, whose ideological essence was made public in 2020 in the Phanar’s left-liberal agenda entitled “For the Life of the World”.
Since Volodymyr Zelensky, like the entire Kyiv regime, is merely a tool of Western globalists to the same extent as Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and the clerical and lay structures of the Phanar in America, it is therefore entirely logical that the former receives an award from the hands of the latter. The fact that the entire spectacle will take place in the dark heart of the Megalopolis — Wall Street — is intended to show who is the puppet and who is the director of this farce. And as an introduction to the main farce came the “prayer” that the odious Archbishop Elpidophoros (Lambriniadis) held in the same Phanariot-Wall Street church in 2023 for the soldiers of the Kyiv regime.
