Hand painted icon of Saint Andrew the First Called. Saint Andrew is a Christian preacher, the first among the 12 apostles, personally called by Jesus Christ. He is the brother of Saint Peter and, like him, he is a fisherman by profession. He is supposed to have been a disciple of John the Baptist before he became a Christian. According to the distribution of the world (oikumene), which the apostles made among themselves, regarding the places where they would preach, Andrew was assigned the vicinity of the Black Sea, including - Asia Minor, Georgia and Scythia. Accordingly, he developed considerable missionary activity in lands that later fell into the modern states of Ukraine, Romania and Russia (and is therefore presented as the first preacher of Christianity to visit the Varangians and Slavs), Bulgaria (in the lands that now represent the Bulgarian Black Sea coast , and in Antiquity scattered with Greek colonies) and Turkey (in that part of it, which before the foundation of the Ottoman Empire represented the Asia Minor possessions of Byzantium). Therefore, he is considered the founder of the Russian Orthodox Church and is presented as the first Patriarch of Constantinople (presumed founder of the church in Byzantium and first bishop of the city).