On September 22, the day of the memory of the righteous Fathers Joachim and Anna and the memories of the III Ecumenical Council (431), Priest Georgy Sergeyev, responsible for organizing the care of the faithful of the Moscow Patriarchate in the territory of the Turkish Republic, celebrated the Divine Liturgy in the Church of the Most Holy Theotokos in Ephesus, where the Council was held.
The service was attended by pilgrims who arrived from Istanbul, Cambridge (UK), Izmir and Kusadasi. Most of them took communion of the Holy Mysteries of Christ.
At the end of the Liturgy, Father George addressed the faithful with a word in which he explained the dogmas of the Third Ecumenical Council.
The clergyman thanked the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Turkey for permission to perform divine services in the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, located in the museum city of Ephesus, as well as the chairman of the Solzhenitsyn Society for the Study of Russian Language and Culture in Izmir, A.V. Ponomarev, for his help in organizing the pilgrimage of believers.
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The ruins of the very first church, created in honor of the Virgin Mary, have been preserved in Ephesus.
The temple building that originally existed on this site was a Roman basilica built in the II century. In the 5th century, it was rebuilt and the Third Ecumenical Council was held here in 431, which approved the dogma of veneration of the Virgin Mary as the Most Holy Theotokos.
The conversation of St. Cyril of Alexandria, delivered in the summer of 431, immediately after the deposition of Nestorius, was heard in this church. This is evidenced by the title of the conversation – "spoken in Ephesus to Nestorius, when the seven came to St. Mary."
The church has been rebuilt many times. In the 7th century, another church was added to it, and it became known as the Double Church.