Close relations
Remember my 6-month-old, still-not-published piece on large Russian bells? So it’s actually about the once-recent (now several months old) restitution of some historic and very large Russian church bells, for many years in the possession of a famous American university, back to the seat of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate—conditional upon the aforementioned university’s receipt of an equivalent set of bells, and by equivalent I mean not only did they have to be fully as large as the originals, but also they had to be personally blessed by Patriarch Alexiy II, the colorful personality who drew international media attention last year for his characterization of homosexuality as a "distortion of the human personality like kleptomania."
A few days ago I got an email from my editor, notifying me of the recent death of Alexiy II, with the following comment:"Good news for gays, maybe; hard to gauge its significance for bells other than the insertion of the word ‘late’ before his first appearance in your piece." Well, I’ve been thinking about this statement and, while I concur that the death of one Russian patriarch doesn’t have any immediately calculable significance in terms of the content of anything I wrote about large Russian bells, I still do hope that they publish the piece before too many more of the involved parties have time to die—because if there’s one thing that’s really distracting in a sexy, super-topical piece about large church bells, it’s having to slog through a bunch of five-syllable Russian names with "late" before them.
I leave you, dear readers, with these amazing photographs of the late Alexei "enjoying close relations with the Kremlin," which look like they might have been taken by AFP / AP photographers who were working overtime as private detectives in the service of Mrs. Putin.
Tags: beards, current events, hats, hope, publications, religion, Russia
December 12th, 2008 at 3:43 am
amazing pictures, Elish! I wonder who will be the next patriarch. Here is ironically a piece on the subject from the Georgian Daily:
http://georgiandaily.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8850&Itemid=72
If the New Yorker waits any longer, you might have to write a sequel detailing the new patriarch’s views on the subject of bells and perhaps investigating the nature of the relationships he enjoys with the Kremlin (though these don’t vary much at this point).
December 14th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Elif, I bet those editors in New York are American. How can I tell? Well, they certainly aren’t rushin’… (you have to say it aloud)
December 18th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
apparently, he was also a German–and he liked Jews!
http://www.newsru.com/religy/18dec2008/nichtrussisch.html
He died, as Billie Hloday sings, “too soon, too soon!”
G.
December 20th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
The tags are what sold me. Beards. Why yes. Hats? Surely. “Bells” is not a tag. That also sold me.
December 21st, 2008 at 3:14 am
Great pics, but there are some even better cuddles before the catafalque at the funeral, which disrupted life in my neighborhood for a few days. The weekend after Alexei’s recall to rai, I was on a small pilgrimage of my own, to Optina Pustin’ and Kozesk’, for a coming with another Alexei (Karamazov) and his ‘creator”.
The bells are ringing all over Kaluga!!