Word: tunic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...years, the standard Russian schoolboy uniform resembled a kind of Junior Red Army outfit, with high-buttoned tunic and heavy-visored cap. Since Stalin's death, the uniform has come under increasing fire as unbecoming and warlike. Last week boys in Moscow and Leningrad showed up with the official new look: an open-lapelled jacket, to be worn with shorts or long pants and topped by a casual European beret. The girls, though, will get no break. They go on wearing the same stern pinafore that dates from the time of Catherine the Great...
Cotton Cloth. The tunic tradition goes back to Flavia Helena, wife of Roman Emperor Constantius Chlorus (he is said to have picked her up in a Balkan tavern during one of his campaigns) and mother of Constantine the Great. Converted to Christianity about 312, Helena later journeyed to the Holy Land, went to Calvary, and (wrote St. Ambrose 70 years later) "had excavations made, the debris cleared away and unearthed three crucifixion trees huddled together and covered with mud . . . She also set out to look for the nails which had pinned the Lord to the Cross and found them." Chronicler...
Little was heard of the tunic for centuries, but in 1196 a seamless piece of cloth was discovered inside the altar of the Trier Cathedral's west choir; it was walled up again until Easter 1512, when German Emperor Maximilian demanded that it be shown. What he saw was a simple, loose silk shirt about five feet long. But on closer look, a woven cotton cloth, believed to be the tunic itself, was found enfolded between layers of silk...
Metal Badge. Amazed by the tunic's power to draw pilgrims, Pope Leo X and the Archbishop of Trier agreed to display it every seven years. Although wars, revolutions and the Reformation stopped its regular appearance, Tunica Domini never lost its appeal. In 1810 about 250,000 pilgrims went to see it, and at the last showing, in 1933, the tally was 2,000,000. Since Cologne's Joseph Cardinal Frings unveiled the tunic for the 1959 pilgrimage last month, almost a million Roman Catholics have visited the cathedral...
...twelve to 19 trains, 2,000 buses daily), stay usually only a day, are moved through the cathedral with military precision. For the Deutsche mark (24?) entrance fee, each visitor gets a devotional book, a metal lapel badge, and a tiny card that has been touched to the tunic (the garment itself is kept under glass, and most pilgrims get no closer to it than about ten feet). Priests acting as guides keep lines moving by walkie-talkies. Whatever the tunic's real origin, says Trier's Bishop Matthias Wehr, "it has been sanctified by the prayers...