KOSTROMA, Central Russia -- The Saint Springs water-bottling plant in Kostroma on Friday received the kind of extra boost that must be the envy of all Russian joint ventures -- a blessing by the patriarch.


Patriarch Alexy pressed a green button, setting off the conveyor belt which the company eventually hopes will shift 150,000 bottles a day.


The patriarch's visit, his first stop on a four-day tour of the Kostroma diocese, 300 kilometers northeast of Moscow, puts his seal on the Orthodox church's first big commercial venture. The church has teamed up with an American company that bottles and markets the water, piped from a famous local spring.


"A Russian product is conquering a market for itself," the patriarch said. " I'm sure it will win a market and the production you have started here will grow and develop."


John King, the company's American director, is keen to stress that it is a commerical venture and that Saint Springs is not "holy water." But all the same, the distinctively shaped bottles, bulging out into an onion dome at the neck and bearing the seal of the archbishop of Kostroma, clearly have an edge over their more secular competitors.


The factory floor Friday was a sea of black cassocks and -- unlike Soviet-era factories with their omnipresent slogans and banners -- a large icon of Christ graced the front entrance.


A reproduction of Andrei Rublev's "Trinity" looked down on the German bottle-molding machine -- the first of its kind in Russia -- which blows up tiny plastic models to full size in half a second. Some nuns asked for some of the small prototype bottles to use for storing holy oil.


Without the participation of the church and especially the go-ahead local archbishop Alexander, King said, he would never have got around all the red tape and bureaucracy.


"When we've needed something done, they've helped us immeasurably," he said.


The Kostroma project almost collapsed on the first day when the mayor asked King to build an apartment block and supermarket for 50 workers. "I let the archbishop talk to him," King said.


According to Nikolai Dazhin, industrial adviser to the governor of Kostroma, the plant, currently employing 30 workers, will only make a "tiny contribution" to the local economy of this once-closed town, hit hard by factory closures and unemployment.


But when the church's half of the venture makes a profit, the archbishop plans to plow it into the diocese.


"Before, we were not allowed to engage in public activities," the patriarch said on Friday. "This is a form of public activity which will allow us to restore historic buildings, to create shelters, homes for the elderly, and make social provisions for the sick."


In a virtually uncontested market Saint Springs is already the leader in bottled Russian noncarbonated water.


Aeroflot international flights will be taking the water from next week.


As the patriarch said, quoting the Gospel, "He who drinks the pure water will gain his reward."