Thousands of Lvivites experienced a spiritual upsurge last week as the Shroud of Turin arrived and was put on display. Or rather, its copy was, but experts insist it is the best of all seven made at the time. It is the same size as the original: 4 m 36 cm by 1 m 40 cm. Most importantly, this copy is the exact replica of the original, one of the greatest Christian relics. On one side it shows a man with hands placed one on top of the other and straight legs. The other side shows the body from the back. There are traces of beard, hair, lips... Stains of blood, a large stain from a wound on the left side... Incidentally, no hi-tech examinations and tests have been able to explain how all these stains appeared on the Shroud in which Jesus was wrapped after the Crucifixion, marking precisely the places where He had been wounded when carrying the Cross to Golgotha. Some researchers believe that the images on the Shroud are the result of divine energy released by the Resurrection. Those seeking more information about the Shroud can find it at St. George Cathedral in Lviv where the copy of the Shroud will be on display for several months. It was delivered to Lviv from Mensk where it is stored at the Cathedral of Sts. Simon and Helen. The copy was brought to Belarus from Italy, May 3, 2002.
Why should this most modern copy find its way to Mensk of all post- Soviet capital cities? 23 years ago, a Belarussian academic Mikhail Tyavlovsky, Ph.D. in Technology, was the first in the USSR to take an interest in the phenomenon of the Shroud of Turin. With time he headed the CIS’s first sindological center in Belarus (sindology — from the Greek sindon, meaning shroud). And so a copy was made and brought to Mensk as an acknowledgment of the Belarusian sindologists’ merits in studying the Christian relic.
The copy will be shown for half a year, first at St. George’s Cathedral and then at the Roman Catholic Dormition Cathedral. Later, the copy will be displayed in Kyiv and Donetsk (there is no information about where exactly, as the options are still being discussed), but not necessarily at a Greek Catholic or Roman Catholic temple. It could be St. Volodymyr or St. Sophia Cathedrals in Kyiv, reports The Day’s Yuri KRIL.
