Word: shrine
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...made the pilgrimage amid the war, and those who did undertook the journey mostly during lulls in fighting. "We came, we worshipped, we left - that was it, we never wanted to stay back," says Lesley Fernando, who is Sinhalese and was brave enough to visit the shrine during the fragile truces in the war. (About 7% of Sri Lanka's population is Catholic, with adherents among both of the nation's major ethnicities: the Sinhalese, who are otherwise mostly Buddhist, and the Tamils, who are predominantly Hindu.) But never have pilgrims been seen in such numbers as they were last...
...voice coming through the public-address system was familiar yet strange. I had not heard it in at least 27 years, not since I had traveled to the sacred Madhu Shrine in northern Sri Lanka in August 1982 when I was a child and on pilgrimage with my family: "Aandavane" ("Oh, Holy Lord" in Tamil), "Aandavane." The words spread through the church compound where half a million others had made the same journey to see Madhu Matha, the Mother of Madhu, in her sacred precincts...
...years, Madhu, some 185 miles (300 km) from the capital of Colombo, remained well within the battlegrounds of the civil war between the predominantly Sinhalese government and the separatist Tamil Tigers. It was not until April 2008 that the military gained full control of the shrine; the Tigers, who demanded a separate state for ethnic Tamils on the island nation, were finally crushed in May 2009. (See pictures from inside Sri Lanka's rebel-held territory...
Pilgrims also passed through camps where some of the more than 280,000 people who were displaced by the last phase of the fighting now live. At the turnoff to the shrine, pilgrims were strictly warned not to stop on the side of the road till they reached the church compound. They were told that the jungles on the sides of the road were still littered with mines and other ordnance; red skull-and-crossbones signs drove the message home. Still, the pilgrims arrived in the tens of thousands, in vans, buses, trucks, public transport, an old British double-decker...
...last year of the civil war was particularly perilous for the shrine. The military had begun a multipronged advance into the Tiger-controlled area in late 2007, and Madhu was about six miles (10 km) north of the line. Earlier that year, 10,000 people were still taking refuge in the church compound, believing the Virgin would protect them. But by February 2008, recalls the Rev. S. Emilianuspillai, then caretaker of the shrine, it was clear that the shrine itself was in danger - and part of the war. On April 3, 2008, fighting had isolated 17 people at the shrine...