Word: januarius
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...rough week for Italian saints. To start with, scientists in Milan announced that a mixture of iron chloride and calcium carbonate, which looks like dried blood, can duplicate a phenomenon that has long been regarded as the miracle of ST. JANUARIUS. A vial believed to contain blood from the 4th century priest is kept in Naples, where several times a year the contents spontaneously liquefy and then return to a powdery state. The researchers, who demonstrated the same phenomenon with the chemical compound, speculate that a chemist may have concocted a hoax. The next day, in Padua, four masked thieves...
...have gathered here," Corrado Cardinal Ursi told the crowd in Naples' cathedral, "not to watch a show, but to witness a miracle." This year, on the late-September feast of San Gennaro (St. Januarius), the miracle came off so smoothly that no one even had to shout the traditional insults of "big stinker" or "green face" at the saint to make his blood boil. It took only 40 minutes of prayer by the cardinal and the local populace for the dark crystalline substance-venerated as the 4th century martyr's blood-to liquefy in its hermetically sealed glass...
...Massachusetts, an anonymous worshiper at St. Barbara's Church in Woburn began placing fresh flowers at the statue of the church's demoted patron saint. A woman in a crowded Naples streetcar invoked the name of St. Januarius - the city's patron - when the car suddenly stopped and slammed passengers together. A few seconds later, she changed her tone in disgust. "The devil with San Gennaro! He's no good any more. My poor saint...
...Date Town. Other valiant adventurers in the book include Hungarian-born Arminius Vambery, who disguised himself as a dervish in 1863 and traveled for ten months through Central Asia; American Januarius MacGahan, the special correspondent of the New York Herald, who dodged both Cossacks and Turkoman cavalry in his daring 1873 coverage of the Russian conquest of Khiva; Irishman Edmund O'Donovan, representing the London Daily News, who was simultaneously held prisoner and elected prince by the Tekke tribesmen of desolate Merv. Said O'Donovan: "It is well worth while to have lived among the Tekkes to know...
...onlookers, wildly slapping backs and shouting "Grazie, San Gennaro," a miracle indeed had occurred: the periodic liquefaction of what is believed by many to be the blood of St. Januarius, martyred 4th century Bishop of Beneventum. When Januarius was flung to wild bears in the arena, so the story goes, the animals would not harm him; instead, the bishop was beheaded and his blood was collected by a faithful follower. For centuries the phenomenon of the liquefaction has been observed in Naples at regular intervals: on San Gennaro's feast day (Sept. 19). on the Saturday before the first...