America’s most Russian Relic

By Nadezhda Kevorkova, Kursk
24/6/2012

If Hillary Clinton truly wanted to understand Russia, she might have found it helpful to put on a kerchief and take a pilgrimage to the city of Kursk, some 500km south of Moscow, on a Friday nine weeks after Russian Easter.

Here she would find something that binds Russia with the United States closer than any treaty ever could; something that defies time, politics, regimes, and even explosives. And the essence of the Russian character is as apparent here as nowhere else.

Last Friday, some 50,000 people came from all over Russia, Belarus and Ukraine to assemble here in Kursk, where they formed an orderly procession stretching several miles, and marched 30 kilometers between two churches, neither of them particularly famous. They gathered at their free will, and didn’t use Facebook or Twitter to organize.

The procession was there to accompany a rather special icon. In fact, Ms. Clinton would not have been allowed to carry this relic, had she been there: in the Russian Orthodox Church, this is considered a man’s privilege. But she would have been allowed to march alongside the pilgrims, even though she belongs to a different church.

People start gathering around the Kursk Cathedral at 7am, and at 10am the procession starts towards the monastery. By 6pm, they reach their destination. The pilgrims pray, kiss the icon, bathe in an ice-cold spring, take with them some of the water they believe to be consecrated, then stay for a fair. Once it is over, they all return home.

This is not Russia’s longest religious procession, as there happen to be longer ones that stretch up to 150km. However, it is the most significant one, because it commemorates an ancient icon of the Russian Orthodox Church that is believed to be miracle-working.

The history of this icon may sound like a fantasy novel. In the 13th century, a local hunter found it underneath a tree. This is where the monastery was built.Russian troops often took it along when they went to war, and it came to be known as wonder working.

In 1898, Russian revolutionary terrorists put a bomb inside the church at the monastery. While the explosion destroyed the church, the icon remained unscathed. It was then that the Church made a replica of the icon.

Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Russia’s White Guard took the original icon with it as it fled to Serbia in 1919. The icon subsequently traveled to the US, where it was kept in the Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, outside New York City. Considered the main holy icon by the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, it is the sole ancient Orthodox relic outside Russia.

Religious processions in Kursk use the replica of the icon. American Orthodox believers have been bringing the miracle-working replica to Russia every year, beginning in 2009.

Bishop Herman of Kursk says that when the American bishops brought the replica to Russia for the first time, some 500,000 people came from all over the country to worship it. That procession stretched almost 30km. That is when the Americans decided they should come to Russia on an annual basis.

By the way, all the donations collected during the procession by Russian pilgrims (who are predominantly people of modest means) are handed over to their American brothers in faith.

Following the revolution of 1917, religious processions were prohibited; the cathedral was turned into a movie theater, the convent into a resort, and the holy spring was blocked with concrete. But even during the hardest times of persecution, people carried on with their religious processions, even when the sacred icon was out of the country. By participating in those processions they faced the threat of losing their jobs, of being imprisoned, exiled or even executed.

I ask Bishop Herman, “What were they doing it for?”
“For the glory of God,” the Bishop replies.

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