Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

Sofia Andrukhovych

In the Basilian Fathers’ monastery of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in Buchach, on Mt. Fedir, it was like this. The novice Benedict was walking at three in the morning from his cell located in the building adjacent to the church on the right—he was on his way to feed the horses in the stables—and he heard through the walls decorated with pilasters with gilded Corynthian capitals the wings of angels rustling beyond the eighteenth-century tempera religious paintings. He did not doubt the nature of those sounds for a moment. It was like the pigeons in the belfry, Benedict said, only the size of the birds had to equal human. In the morning they discovered that a lock of hair from the severed head of John the Baptist vanished without a trace, as did the relics of St. Munditia, a

needle from the Crown of Thorns, and a piece of the sponge with which they gave Jesus the vinegar to drink. All these priceless divine objects vanished together with a golden chest encrusted with precious stones. Rabbi David Moshe, founder of the Society for the Study of the Torah in Chortkiv, reported the disappearance, from the secret hiding place in the Old Synagogue, of a silver sugar bowl on curved feet, decorated with vegetal patterns, which was used for storing the etrog for Sukkot. True, something else was inside it at the time, but this, according to the Rabbi, was a secret that could not be divulged at any circumstances. When from the synagogue in Brody, the famed city of open doors and of the great Baal

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