Peace of Christ be with you all,

I don’t post here often but I do read your posts. I was interested in this thread about the "Holy Fire" as it pertains to may family very directly. In the year 1053 AD, my ancestors living on the Greek island of Samos prayed to God that He would allow a pious woman in our family to conceive, as she and her husband were trying for many years but to no avail. She and her husband made a vow, that should the wife conceive they would dedicate this child t the service of the Lord. Some thing very similar to what Hanna in the Old Testament vowed about her son Samuel. Sure enough a year later she conceived a male child. Deciding to do good on their promise, my ancestors moved from the Island of Samos and went to Jerusalem, were the child eventually grew up to be a Greek Orthodox priest serving the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Chapel of St. Jacob. That priest then had a son who also became a priest and so on and so forth for 25 consecutive generations. Our original Greek family name was Papadupoulus but because of so many priests in the family it was changed to Khoury, which is a Syriac word meaning priest. As far as I know, my family has the longest line to continual Greek Orthodox priesthood anywhere. The last person to be a Greek Orthodox priest in our family was my paternal Grandfather named Fr. George Khoury who served the same church and was the archpriest serving the Arab speaking Greek Orthodox community in Jerusalem.

The reason I went through this long introduction is to state that my priestly ancestors always attended the services of the Holy Fire in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and can attest to it’s authenticity for almost the 950 years that they have been there. More recently, my grand father, Fr. George Khoury, was the priest who would be one of the first people to light his candle from the one that the Patriarch holds after coming out of the tomb. I can assure you first hand that this miracle is true and genuine.

By Dimitrius Khoury (Jerusalem) 2002

Cited: Byzantine forum / Topic: The "Holy Fire" of Orthodoxy -- Question?