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The House of the Vigin MaryOn October 18th, 1881, a French priest, the Abbé Julien Gouyet of Paris, discovered a small stone building on a mountain overlooking the Aegean Sea and the ruins of ancient Ephesus in Turkey. He believed it was the house where the Virgin Mary had lived in the final years of her life on earth as described in the visions of the German nun Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824), who had never been to Ephesus during her lifetime, published in detail in a book by Clemens Brentano. His discovery was not taken seriously at the time but ten years later, in 1891, two Lazarist missionaries from İzmir rediscovered the building, using the same source for a guide. It was then learned that the four-walled, roofless ruin had been venerated from time immemorial by the members of a distant mountain village (then called Kirkince but now Şirince) who were descended from the Christians of Ephesus. They called it Panaya Kapulu (Chapel of the Most Holy), believed it was there that she had died and had every year made a pilgrimage to it on August 15th, the date on which the rest of the Christian world celebrated Mary's Assumption from Jerusalem. The discovery in fact revives and strengthens a constant and ancient Christian tradition, 'the tradition of Ephesus', which has always competed with the generally accepted 'Jerusalem tradition' concerning in particular, the place of the Blessed Virgin's passing from this world. |
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