Moscow, Russia - Russians crowded into candlelit churches and stood solemnly for hours Sunday night as priests chanted the liturgy for masses celebrating Orthodox Christmas.
Christmas falls on Jan. 7 for Orthodox Christians in the Holy Land, Russia and other Orthodox churches that use the old Julian calendar instead of the 16th-century Gregorian calendar adopted by Catholics and Protestants and commonly used in secular life around the world.
Patriarch Alexy II, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, presided at the country's most symbolically important Mass, at Christ the Savior Cathedral near the Kremlin in downtown Moscow.
The cathedral, a reconstruction of the church dynamited under the officially atheist Communist regime of Josef Stalin, embodies the Orthodox Church's resurgent importance in the post-Soviet era.
Dmitry Medvedev, the first deputy prime minister who is all but certain to be elected President Vladimir Putin's successor in March, was prominently shown in state-controlled television's live broadcast of the Mass.
Putin attended a Christmas mass at a smaller church in Veliky Ustyug, about 650 kilometres northeast of Moscow.