ATHENS – With Easter week church services being allowed in Greece, with conditions, dozens of priests queued outside the Metropolitan Cathedral of Athens to conduct COVID-19 self-tests.

The testing was an initiative by the Medical Association of Athens in cooperation with the leader of the Church of Greece, Archbishop Ieronymos, a survivor of the Coronavirus after he was hospitalized late in 2020 as the pandemic raged.

Churchgoers are required to wear double masks, both indoors and outdoors, while priests and church staff are required to undergo testing but there were immediate scenes of people violating requirements to keep safe social distances.

There's an alleged limit of one person per 25 square meters inside churches and one per 10 square meters outside and people are supposed to use hand sanitizers with no report how any of the rules could be enforced at churches.

Another big test will come on Good Friday when people by the scores of thousands go to churches where the resurrection will be celebrated at 9 p.m. instead of midnight to meet an overnight curfew.