Immersing Themselves in a Chilly Tradition
ISTRA, Moscow Region — It was below freezing, and many of the worshipers had been standing for hours in a poorly heated 17th-century church.
The priest even gave them a last-minute warning. “You don’t have to submerge yourself,” he told the crowd of several hundred people gathered at the riverbank Saturday morning. “That is only for the physically strong.”
But when the time came, dozens of men and women stripped to their underwear and plunged into the ice-cold water to celebrate Epiphany, one of the most important holidays in the Russian Orthodox Church.
“I don’t feel cold at all,” Alexander Romanov, a paunchy, middle-aged manager at a Moscow medicine company, said as he dressed afterward.
From elderly pensioners to publicity-hungry politicians, thousands of Russians partook in the tradition of ritual immersion Friday night and Saturday morning.
There was even a sizeable crowd in the Siberian city of Yakutsk, where temperatures hit minus 41 degrees Celsius and authorities had to cut a hole through meter-thick ice on the Lena River, Interfax reported.
Several politicians announced plans to participate in the Epiphany ritual, including Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party. The flamboyant LDPR leader has made a tradition of immersing himself every year, usually in the presence of television cameras.
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Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 5:38 pm under