In the three weeks since St. Nicholas came to Moscow, more than 300,000 people have stood in huge lines for up to 10 hours to visit a gilded ark thought to carry his bone fragments. Yet the queues stretching down the Moscow River embankment from Christ the Savior Cathedral are something of their own marvel.
The massive turnout to see the saint’s relics, which are on loan from their home in Bari, Italy for the first time, underline how strongly the Orthodox Church has become a part of Russians’ sense of themselves a quarter-century after the collapse of the officially …read more
Source: Voice of America
