The writer and priest Gala Galaction left us one of the most beautiful descriptions of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. He lived the narrated experience right from the Flower Festival of 1926.
“Accompanied by the most pious Theophylact, I enter the square of the Patriarchal Church and from here into the sacred labyrinth, just as the organ of the Latin chapel was laying down, at the dawn of this morning, its last sonorous chortles. My companion carries me with an energetic hand through the seething mass of thousands of people under the domes… I see for the first time what is the Holy Sepulcher and what is the architectural chasm and with stalactites of candles, in the bottom of which rests – sacrosanct stalagmite – the chapel of St. Mormânt”, he wrote, a year later, in the publication “Gandirea”.
He didn’t even manage to get rid of what he was living, that he ends up in the sanctuary of the grave. “I pass, broken in two, through an antechamber, no bigger than an elevator room and then, after leaving, as if from the mouth of a golden furnace, other worshipers predecessors, we also enter… The dream is reality!… A reality illuminated by candles and presided over by a priest, with an epitrachyl. I am in the holiest place on earth. Half of this stone ark is composed of slabs between which rests, for three days, the Conqueror The dead. Above, there is a marble slab, maybe pink, which those too few Christians, entering here, with dry eyes and icy senses, cannot see well…”.
“The church looks like an island with golden trees”
From there, they headed to Golgotha, where the Holy Cross was buried. “From the altar we go up, on the south side, about twenty steps, cross a corridor and enter a second church, much smaller this time, and divided into two halves: one Greek and the other Latin. Here is the Golgotha chapel. Under our altar stands, encased in silver, the hollow stone, sealed by tradition as the bearer of the Saviour’s cross, at the hour of his crucifixion on Calvary. We return to the holy altar. I laboriously search, in the Greek of the New Testament, those few elementary phrases that I need for the curiosity and questions of my brothers in Christ. I look around me… The semicircular altar has below it a girdle of semicircular steps, a great gilt for the Patriarch, and an obscure double-bottom, with mouths like a lodge, in which must be the sacred pantries and treasuries. The holy refectory rises like a pedestal and has a canopy with pillars above it”.
After the patriarch arrived and all the priests present took part in the Holy Liturgy, their procession began to go around the church of St. Mormânt. “The church looks like an island with golden trees, in the middle of the thousands of heads that wander around it in the overlapping galleries, from the huge surrounding rotunda, all those worshipers or simple tourists who have not found a place on the floor, or have already secured a place in the galleries, sit in multicolored clusters. The priests sing a slow and solemn melody, like their procession… they keep accompaniment extraordinary, which for the moment I do not understand, the priestly singing helps… It is a crystalline ison with the gurgling of nightingales, which soars to the highest vaults and shakes the air of the holy place. You would think that they are real nightingales, who sit in hidden cages and who, hypnotized by the fire of the candles below, began to sing… I doze and understand what is: Arab women and girls vocalize like nightingales!’he described that unforgettable procession.
