The belt of the Virgin, according to church tradition, is a thing that the Virgin Mary wore during her lifetime and shortly before the Assumption gave to two widows of Jerusalem. Then the relic went its own way, and the path was unexpectedly long.
At the beginning of the fifth century, under the emperor Arcadia, the belt was brought to Constantinople. They were lowered into the ark, sealed with the royal seal with the date of August 31. It was put in the Chalcopratian temple. The daughter of Arkady, Pulcheria, a woman of authority and devoutness, arranged night prayers at the temple — so that the shrine would not lie unattended.
And then something happened for which the holiday was fixed in the calendar.
Emperor Leo VI Wise ruled at the turn of the IX-X centuries. His wife Zoe was tormented by an incomprehensible ailment — chroniclers delicately write about the «unclean spirit.» Zoe dreamed in her dream that she would recover if she was given a belt. Leo asked the patriarch to open the ark. He opened and all gasped: the fabric had not decayed for five hundred years. The Patriarch put his belt on the Empress, the illness receded. The shrine was removed back, and August 31, according to the Julian calendar — now September 13 — became the Day of the Position of the Belt.
After the capture of Constantinople in 1453, the belt disappeared from the city. He was cut into pieces, and they scattered throughout the Christian world. The most famous piece of donkey in the Vatopedi monastery on Athos is said to have been brought by the Serbian prince Lazar. The other was in Cyprus at the Trooditissa Monastery. The third is in the Georgian Zugdidi, in the Vlakherna Church: he was brought by the niece of the Byzantine emperor Roman III, who married King Bagrat IV.
There are small particles in Russia — in the Moscow Ilyinsky Church on Obydenko, in the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, in the Kazan Cathedral of St. Petersburg. Each with its own story, sometimes documented, often passed from word of mouth.
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