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Thousands at service to greet relics of St. John the Baptist. AP on Jul 30, 2015 More then four thousand people gathered in the Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on Wednesday to welcome the relics …More
Thousands at service to greet relics of St. John the Baptist.

AP on Jul 30, 2015 More then four thousand people gathered in the Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on Wednesday to welcome the relics of St. John the Baptist, that has been brought to Russia from Montenegro. The head of Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexy II, conducted a special service in the central Moscow cathedral to celebrate the arrival of the icon, of the right hand of St. John the Baptist. The relics will be kept in the Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow and will be open to public every day for two weeks. After June 16 they will be taken to Ukraine and then on to Belarus. During the 18th century the right hand of St. John the Baptist belonged to the Russian Tzar family and remained in the country for more then a hundred years, until the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. They were then given to the Russian Empress Maria Fyodorovna, who took them out of the country. The relics have been kept in Germany, and then in the former Yugoslavia. Since 1993 they were stored in the monastery in Cetinje in Montenegro. Keyword-religion