MOSCOW - Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II was flown to Moscow on Tuesday from the southern city of Astrakhan, where he had been hospitalized with hypertension, church officials said.
The 73-year-old Russian Orthodox Church leader fell ill while visiting Astrakhan on Monday, prompting church officials to cancel his participation in a service for victims of the hostage crisis in Moscow, the Interfax news agency reported. Alexy was put in the intensive care unit of a local hospital in the city, located about 1280 kilometers (800 miles) south of Moscow.
"The Patriarch had a hypertension crisis yesterday, but his condition improved today," Gulnaz Sotnikova, the head of the church's charity foundation, said on Russia's NTV television.
Another church official, speaking on condition of anonymity, also said Alexy's condition had improved but would not comment further, saying the church would make an official statement Wednesday.
The ITAR-Tass news agency quoted Nikolai Kabachik, a doctor who treated the patriarch in Astrakhan, as saying that Alexy was in satisfactory condition, which allowed him to be put on a flight. However, the news agency also said that the patriarch's condition had worsened during the night. He was accompanied on the special flight to Moscow by a doctor and was to be examined after arriving in Moscow, Interfax said.
According to Interfax, Russian Orthodox Church officials in Astrakhan said Alexy's health worsened because of his concerns over the hostage crisis.
Alexy began his clerical career in his native Tallinn, the capital of the now independent Baltic nation of Estonia, in the mid-1940s. In 1964, he became a permanent member of the Holy Synod, the church's governing body, and he was named patriarch in 1990, as the Soviet Union was collapsing.
The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had loosened the communist restrictions on the church beginning in the mid-1980s, and Alexy presided over its resumption of a central place in Russian life. He oversaw the return of confiscated church property and the reopening of churches and monasteries that accompanied a religious revival across the nation. But he has also faced persistent questions about alleged collaboration with Soviet authorities who sought to control the church.