A new giant bell is lifted to its place on top of the Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra Bell Tower in Sergiyev Posad outside Moscow, yesterday. The 72-tonne bell will replace one destroyed in 1930 by Bolsheviks together with the other 26 bells of the monastery.
- Reuters photoMOSCOW (AP):
A GARGANTUAN church bell that is said to be the biggest ever to ring in Russia was blessed yesterday and hoisted up to a belfry at one of the holiest sites of the country's dominant Russian Orthodox faith.
Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II arrived at the Trinity St. Sergius monastery in Sergiyev Posad, northeast of Moscow, to bless the 72-metric tonne (79-short tonne) Czar Bell, modelled after a 1748 bell destroyed during Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's campaign against religion in the 1930s.
The bell was cast at a shipyard in St. Petersburg and hauled slowly to Sergiyev Posad on the bed of a special truck that made the journey in three days.
It is the third bell to be replaced at the monastery, where some 40 bells were wrecked in Stalin's state atheism campaign. In 2002, two big bells with President Vladimir Putin's name on them were raised up to the top of the bell tower there after being blessed by Alexy.
Monastery officials had said earlier that the new bell would be up and ringing in time for last Sunday's Easter celebrations.
A Czar Bell cast in 1735 weighs more than 200
metric tonnes (220 short tonnes), but it cracked during a fire and never rang. It is now on exhibit at the Kremlin.
Under Stalin, thousands of church bells were smashed and re-smelted across the Soviet Union as churches were razed and monks executed. Churches that were not torn down were used as breweries, factories, secret police facilities and for other
purposes.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought a strong revival in the Russian Orthodox church.
