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Much-venerated icon stolen from church in old Russian city of Kursk
(Itar-Tass)
KURSK, May 1 (Itar-Tass) - A replica of the Icon of the Virgin Mary of the Sign, one of the most venerated images of the Virgin in the Russian Orthodox Church, was stolen last night from the Sign bishopric Cathedral in the western Russian city of Kursk, 500 kilometers to the South of Moscow, a duty officer at the city’s interior department said.
Monday morning, a group of operatives and investigators was dispatched to the cathedral, and the chief of the Kursk Region police, General Viktor Bushulyov took the course of investigation under personal control.
The Virgin Mary of the Sign, which the Russian Church puts on the list of miracle-working icons, is considered to be a defender and intercessor of the Kursk territory.
Tradition holds that the Virgin showed her image to two hunters on the bank of a local river September 8, 1295. The miracle occurred when the hunters were sitting by the trunk of an old tree, the fact from which the icon derived its second name – the Virgin Mary of the Roots.
In 1596, Czar Theodore ordered to build a monastery right at the site where the holy image had first been seen 300 years before that. The monastery is widely known across the Eastern Orthodox world as the Kursk Hermitage of the Roots.
Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia Alexy II, who visited it in September 1991, called the Hermitage of the Kursk number three backbone spiritual center of the Church, along with Holy Holly Trinity/St Sergius’s Laura near Moscow and St Seraphim of Sarov’s convent in Diveyevo, near the city of Nizhny Novogorod.
Beginning with 1618, major religious processions were held in Kursk twice a year, when the icon would be carried from the cathedral to the monastery in spring and would return from there in fall.
The original Vergin Mary of the Sign was taken out of Russia in 1920 and it now belongs to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, based in the U.S.
Until this Sunday, the diocese of Kursk had its replica.
