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A day to celebrate family and love
Published: 08 July, 2010, 21:49
TAGS: Religion, Russia, Holiday, Prime Time Russia
On July 8 Russia celebrates what some call its own version of Valentine’s Day. However, the day of St. Peter and Fevroniya is less commercial and more chaste than the Western holiday.
The very name of the holiday, which was made official in 2008, speaks for itself.
The All-Russian Day of Family, Love and Faithfulness is celebrated on the day the Russian Orthodox Church commemorates St. Peter and Fevroniya of Murom – actual characters from an early 13th-century chronicle.
Young Prince Peter suffered from leprosy and had a prophetic dream that he would be cured by a beekeeper’s daughter (Fevroniya) from neighboring Ryazan. When Prince Peter met Fevroniya he made a pledge to marry her after she cured him. In the story, the nobleman did not keep his word and soon got ill again. Fevroniya cured him again and afterward they married and lived happily ever after. The love was so strong that when the prince’s councilors objected to his marrying a commoner, Peter abdicated the throne and left the city with his wife.
Peter and Fevroniya took monastic vows when they grew old and lived in different monasteries, but died on the same day and at the same hour. They asked to be buried in one casket, but people thought this was an improper request and buried them in different caskets and even in different monasteries. Then, a miracle happened – on the day after the burial, the bodies were in one casket. Three hundred years later the Russian Orthodox Church canonized Peter and Fevroniya as saints.
The secular holiday of Family, Love and Faithfulness was instituted in 2008 at the initiative of Svetlana Medvedeva, the wife of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. The symbol of the new holiday is a daisy.
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