Chris Violaris becomes the Godfather
September 10th, 2007By Sebastian Kinsman, Ex-partner
of Chris Violaris, MD of Buy & Sell Bulgaria
On the sultry evening of August 8, 2007, our daughter Lara Daphnie Kinsman was christened by the Bishop of Varna and Veliki Preslav, Metropolitan Kyrill, Member of the Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, at Varna’s Assumption Cathedral.
It was a considerable event. Friends arrived in Varna from across Bulgaria. Victoria’s mother, Valentina, and sister Anya, travelled from Kishiniev in Moldova, and my brother Ivan flew in with his family from Poland. Soderoula, Chris Violaris’s sister, had gone to great efforts to get every detail right for the elaborate ceremony. Chris Violaris also went to some expense buying the various paraphernalia at a special Orthodox Christening shop in Athens. There was a men’s choir to add to the richness of the occasion.
Anyway, Lara Daphne was eventually well and truly dunked in the giant copper bowl filled with water mixed with olive oil. She cried her eyes out, was dressed, and we moved on to the smart Horizont Restaurant for dinner. This took place on the terrace overlooking the Black Sea. This was a hell of a spread: shopska salad with rakia, lavrak, a local white-fleshed fish, accompanied by white wine produced from the grapes grown on “Marina Hills”, and dessert.
Everything had gone perfectly from the moment we rolled up at the Cathedral in Chris Violaris’s Rolls Royce Silver Phantom until the moment Alex, Lara’s half-brother, banged his head into a plate glass window at the restaurant, causing a bloody gash. And everything went perfectly again after a swift visit to the local Accident and Emergency Hospital where he was stitched up.
Lara Daphne Kinsman has quite exotic origins: English father, Moldovian mother - the beautiful Victoria, whose bright blue eyes she has inherited, Bulgarian half-brother, and now she has a Cypriot Godfather.
Clockwise from left to right: Sebastian, Chris, Chris’s wife Assia, Chris’s daughter Stephanie, Lara’s half-brother Alex and Victoria with Lara Daphne
