† Holy Resurrection Russian Orthodox Sobor, Vancouver

On May 17, 2017, the retired colonel and his wife were sitting on the seashore in Sochi, admiring the open spaces of the sea, enjoying the clean sea air and the vastness of the water surface.

Suddenly, their attention was attracted by a flock of dolphins, which was near the shore and together tried to push some heavy object out of the water. When they managed to do this, the intelligent animals immediately swam away. They managed to count the dolphins, there were twelve of them.

Witnesses of the event decided to consider an unexpected gift of marine life, overgrown with mud, but when they cleaned it, they were shocked. The eyes of the Mother of God looked at the person from an old icon.

How the shrine could end up on the seabed – no one knows, and no one can yet understand why the dolphins realized that it needed to be urgently delivered to the shore and given to people.

It was an icon of the Mother of God (later it turned out – “Znamenie”). The icon found in such a miraculous way was brought to Moscow by the same person who stands next to Father Barnabas (in a sports jacket) – a retired colonel, a veteran of the Alpha group.