The myrrh-streaming of holy images, along with radiance and fragrance, are special signs of the icon of God, signs of the laying on of it of a special mission for people, of conveying a certain message to humanity. In the history of the Orthodox Church there are many miraculous images.
Mother Protector
It is not surprising that most of these icons are represented by the images of the Virgin, the Heavenly Intercessor of mankind. Who else is so worried about their children if not a mother? The icon of the crying Mother of God mourns for her negligent children, that is, for us, mourns our negligence, suffers from our fall. The image exudes not only tears or myrrh, but also blood, the appearance of which is considered an omen, a harbinger of trouble.
The images of the Holy Virgin were recognized as miraculous when they helped people - healed the sick, protected from enemies and natural disasters. Icons moved, gained, and streamed, their help sometimes accompanied the appearance of the Virgin to someone in a dream, in which she specified the place of finding Her image.
Holy miraculous images of the Virgin
The most common crying icons with the face of the Virgin are Pryazhevskaya, Ilyinskaya-Chernigovskaya, as well as Kazan-Vysochinovskaya, the Novgorod icon of the Mother of God crying “Tenderness” and this is not a complete list of holy images known to the Orthodox world.
The historical facts of the "crying" of images
A miracle called the “crying icon” appeared to people in ancient times. Even in the 4th century AD, the Pisidian image of the Mother of God in Sozopol was myrrh-streaming. In the 13th century, the citizens of Veliky Ustyug prayed for the salvation of the city from a stone city, and a wonderful world appeared on the icon of the Annunciation. In 1592, an icon of the Mother of God crying under the name “Praise of the Most Holy Theotokos” saved itself. The robbers stole the holy image from Mount Athos, were afraid when the icon burst into tears, and immediately returned it to its place.
In 1848, in the Moscow house of a colonel on Easter, the list of the image of the Mother of God “The Sister of Sinners” was pacified. Drops of miro, which had an oily consistency and a very pleasant aroma, subsequently healed the patients.
In 1991, the icon of the Sovereign cried at the Christmas time in the St. Nicholas Perervinsky Monastery , in the summer of that year tears appeared on the eyes of the Holy Savior in the Vologda church, a weeping icon with the face of the Virgin in the local church also struck the inhabitants of Georgia.
The icons of the patron saints of the Russian tsars repeatedly puzzled and surprised, for example, the Fedorov icon in 1994 was myrrh-streaming. This happened in Tsarskoe Selo. When members of the royal family were officially recognized as martyrs, the Vladimir Icon of the Virgin exuded a strong aroma of spirits loved by Empress Alexandra Fedorovna. Later, this fragrance became known to all "Red Moscow".
When blood flows through the icons
When the holy image is bleeding, it is not just a crying icon. The dream in which you see it is interpreted by somnologists as an omen of some bad, woeful event. Some may consider the historical facts of the bleeding of holy faces and events that occurred later to be mere coincidences, but many clergymen consider the appearance of blood on the holy image an omen of misfortune.
For example, in the Jerusalem temple of the Holy Sepulcher, there is an icon weeping with blood. We are talking about the image of "The laying of the crown of thorns." Its plot is a story about the bullying of the Romans over Jesus in the last hours of his life.
From the beginning of our era, this image bleed three times, and all cases occurred on the eve of Easter. In 1572, a few days before Bartholomew’s night , a bloody liquid flowed in the image, and on August 24 almost a third of the population was destroyed in Paris. The second case occurred in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II. Finally, in April 2001, the astonished pilgrims witnessed the bleeding of the holy image on the night of Great Saturday, and on September 11, 2001, the New York skyscrapers subsequently collapsed, and the tragedy claimed hundreds of lives. So were the facts of the appearance of bloody tears on the image a kind of signs foreshadowing trouble?
What can we say that the weeping icon of the Iverskaya church of the Zelenchukskaya village struck all the villagers with bloody tears right before the start of the Chechen war? Tears in the image before the seizure of the school in Beslan on September 1, 2004, were also a tragic sign.
A bit of scientific
At present, special organizations have been created and are working to find out the causes and sources of the icon's myrrh. These commissions include groups of scholars of various disciplines and a theological diaspora.
In 1999, the Moscow Patriarchate agreed to establish a Committee whose mission is to describe the facts of the miraculous myrrh-streaming of icons that have ever occurred in Russia. It turned out that the world differs in appearance, color, smell and consistency - it is thick, viscous like resin, and it is transparent like dew. Miro has a very stable and dense smell of roses, lilacs or frankincense. The shape and size of the droplets are also very different from each other. Sometimes drops appear on the whole image, sometimes oozing pointwise. There are known cases of the flow of the world against the force of attraction - from the bottom up, moreover, there is an opinion that the influence of the world updates the icon, the colors of the image become brighter.
Are they alive?
The Moscow Patriarchate is also involved in the study of the world highlighted by icons. The conclusions reached by the Patriarchate regarding the composition of the miraculous substance state that it is a protein substance of unknown origin. Different types of myro have been studied, some of which are similar in composition to oils, tears of a person, or plasma of his blood. For example, an analysis of the composition of the world exuded by holy relics resting in the Kiev Pechersk Lavra showed that it is based on a protein that can only be generated by a living creature. And is the crying icon really meaningfully sending us certain signs? Scientists have no answer to this question. And you?