Giorgi Kalatozishvili, Tbilisi. Exclusively for Vestnik Kavkaza
Prime Minister of Georgia Irakli Garibashvili stated that the state will pay I full for the funeral and transportation of the body of Georgian Orthodox archimandrite Ilya Kartozia to his homeland.
“He demonstrated an example of civic heroism at the expense of his life, saving people on a burning ferry,” Garibashvili thinks.
Catholicos-Patriarch of Georgia Ilya II called the deed by father Ilya “an example of faithful service of God.”
Ilya Kartozia, the head of the Mtskheti Monastery, was travelli.g by ferry to the Italian town of Bari where St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker is buried, when the fire started aboard the Norman Atlantic.
According to recent data, at least 10 people died in the fire on December 28th. Survivors said that panic started, and the crew were poorly prepared for the emergency situation.
According to an Italian journalist, Roberto Persico, Father Ilya and the captain of the ferry helped people to get into lifeboats. He gave his place to a woman with a child and stayed aboard. “It is difficult to imagine what it is like to stay on a burning ferry through a storm, in the dark; what fear hangs upon a person!” the author writes, describing awful scenes when people “tramped women and children to get out of the boat.” “Humanity disappears from people’s hearts; there is space only for the animalistic instinct of survival,” Roberto Persico writes. “But in these dramatic conditions there was a man who saved humanity, even though he couldn’t save all the passengers.”
According to other Italian media, Ilya Kartozia and the captain helped a Greek family reach a lifeboat, passing a rope bridge, but when Kartozia stepped on the rope bridge himself, the rope broke, and the young monk fell into the raging sea.
These days hundreds of people come to the Mtskheti Monastery to bow to the ashes of a true Christian. Many people note that Father Ilya repeated a deed of Professor Iosif Zhordania: on August 20th 1962 an aircraft in which the well-known doctor was flying fell into the sea near Rio de Janeiro. Zhordania couldn’t swim, but he gave his life-jacket to a girl and drowned in the ocean.
