Cyprus 'weeping icons' bring fame to tiny chapel
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This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.
See the article in its original context from March 1995.
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Standing on the side of a narrow dirt road cutting through dense citrus groves and vineyards, the chapel of St. Catherine in the village of Kolossi has been visited by thousands since local villagers reported seeing its icons weep on 17 February.
Belief in miracles associated with icons -- weeping, bleeding or causing instant healing -- is not uncommon in Cyprus, which boasts a church tracing its lineage back to the time of Christ's first companions, known to Christians as the Apostles. Veneration of icons -- a typically Byzantine form of religious art -- is a powerful sign Cyprus has kept its Orthodox heart despite centuries of occupation by Christians from Western Europe and Moslems from Turkey.
Reports of miracles, such as the one in the chapel of St. Catherine, are taken seriously. The media treat them without a trace of scepticism or lightheartedness and people regularly swap icon-related miracle stories.
"I took my handkerchief out and wiped the tears of the icons," said Kosta Christophides, who heads the village committee which looks after the chapel, located near the medieval castle of Kolossi eight miles west of the port city of Limassol.
"I don't know why it happened, but what I do know is that it did happen," he told the weekly To Periodico.
A young mother who has refused to be photographed or named said her 16-month-old son's walking handicap was instantly cured by the icons of St. Catherine.
Cypriots say reports of miracles associated with icons on the island surface an average of once a year. "When an icon cries or bleeds, it is trying to tell us something. Perhaps it is saying we should get together and stop hurting one another," said a 30-year-old Cypriot woman. "Icons give me hope and "strength," she said earnestly. Like many young Greek Cypriots, her trendy and westernised appearance conceals a level of piety.
Icons, which depict holy personages from Christ and the Virgin Mary down to saints little known outside their locality, are a key part of the bond between church and people in Cyprus.
Priests venerate them daily and the faithful, sometimes driving smart new European or Japanese cars, go on modern day pilgrimages to small and isolated chapels and monasteries where some of the oldest and more popular icons are kept.
Once there, they queue for their turn to pay homage by placing a kiss on the icons and crossing themselves. Children unable to reach are lifted by parents to kiss the icons.
Many keep icons at home, the workplace, in their purses and cars to protect them and also as an outward proof of piety.
Kolossi's chapel of St. Catherine, which looks more like a poor man's cottage from the outside except for the cross on the roof, has joined the list of places of worship associated with miracles in Cyprus.
Its new status is manifested by the large number of visitors seeking the intercession of its patron saints, the huge number of candles lit to venerate them and the pile of coins and banknotes on the collections tray.
So much spiritual value is attached to icons in Cyprus that when a famous one from Greece's monastic Mount Athos arrived on the island last November it was given a red carpet welcome. The icon of the Virgin Mary and Christ was received at the main international airport at Larnaca by President Glafcos Clerides, members of his government and the head of the Cypriot Church, Archbishop Chrysostomos.
The icon was said at the time to have been brought to Cyprus to hasten a solution to the island's intractable problem and end its division, created when Turkey invaded the island in 1974. Ankara says it had to intervene to protect the island's Turkish minority. after a coup in Nicosia inspired by a junta then ruling Athens and aimed at uniting Cyprus with Greece.
Tens of thousands of Cypriots thronged to churches in Nicosia, Larnaca, Limassol, Paphos and Paralimni where the icon, on its first trip outside Greece, was on display.
