Late last year, thanks to a gift from Olga and Elena Rostropovitch in memory of their parents, Mstislav Rostropovitch and Galina Vishnevskaya, three bells were added to the five extant bells at St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Washington, DC. In the seven months since then, through the efforts of parishioner and musician Olga Moroz and of Reader Andrei Skurikhin, the cathedral’s collection of 14 tunes to which everyone had become accustomed has increased to 95.

Now the church services are accompanied by peals in the traditions of the Rostov and Yaroslavl Kremlins, the Holy Trinity-St. Alexander Nevsky Lavra and the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra, Moscow churches and monasteries, and also peals especially composed for the cathedral by renowned contemporary professionals from Russia. (The parish wishes to extend its special thanks to Sergei Platonov of Moscow’s Ilya Drozdykhin School for Church Bell-Ringers, and to Andrei Dyachkov of the International Center for the Art of Bell-Ringing.)

The parish plans to put recordings of the bells of St. John the Baptist Cathedral on its website in the near future, so that all visitors to the site might be able to download them and enjoy the beauty of their peals whenever they want.

As it says in the Rubrics for Church Bell Ringing, "It is the purpose of Orthodox bell-ringing that through its sound [which is] imbued with God’s grace, Christians be strengthened in piety and faith; demonic powers, wiles, and slanders be driven away and destroyed; God’s wordless Creation and the elements be calm and serve to the benefit of man."

Live Broadcast of Divine Services

Through the efforts of parishioner James Seaman and his assistants, a system for live broadcasting of the divine services over the Internet has been installed in the cathedral. The parish will primarily broadcast Sunday Liturgies and services for the Twelve Great Feasts. In order to watch the services on your computer or smartphone, visit the parish’s YouTube channel here. To receive notifications of upcoming broadcasts, you need to sign up by clicking "Subscribe."