At all times, the most irreconcilable disagreements between the atheists and believers arose, oddly enough, because of their attitude to miracles. The first ones exclaimed: “Vraki, this cannot be. This contradicts the laws of physics!” The second were indignant: "Atheists are unbelievers, there is no cross upon you. This is a miracle …"
At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, there were so many reports of miracles that in November 2004, with the blessing of the church, a special expert working group was created. The scientists included in it - physicists, chemists, biologists and paleontologists - after numerous studies stated: in the Russian Orthodox Church, there really is a fact of myrrh-streaming icons and finding them in churches, wonderful self-renewal of holy images takes place. All these cases were studied in the best forensic laboratories of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The most "studied" miracle was the myrrh-streaming of icons.
Myrrh-streaming icon
In 1994, a miracle happened in the Remizov’s house from the village of Lokot in the Bryansk region. It all started with the campaign of Natalia Remizova in the "Children's World". In that crucial era, people learned to survive. People scurried from one empty store to another in the hope of getting at least something. Natalya suddenly saw through a gray, dull crowd a bright sunny flare. On the wall of the store hung an Orthodox calendar with the image of the Seraphim-Diveevo icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary “Tenderness”. He was last year, no longer needed. Natalya bought it, cut out the icon and hung it on the wall. In 1999, during an illness, Natalia read the hymnal and suddenly felt an amazing fragrance. The whole room was filled with aromas of honey, dew, outlandish flowers and herbs. The smell emanated from the icon hanging on the wall, the same one carved from the usual calendar.
Natalya Nikolaevna and her husband decided to make a frame for the icon, but were shocked when they saw the face of the Virgin appearing on the back side. The couple invited an Orthodox priest, read the akathist, and the icon began to myrrh. The aromatic substance stood out so abundantly that the researchers had the opportunity to collect it in a medical tray.
The laboratory of Moscow State University has ascertained that the released substance by its chemical composition is a vegetable oil. But how it in itself in the eyes of eyewitnesses comes to the Orthodox calendar, no one knows. Why does it suddenly appear on the icons and faces of worshipers in temples? Scientists have no answers to these questions. Maybe that's why almost all seriously ill people were healed in the village of Lokot. They came to Natalya’s house with a variety of ailments, and left healthy, as evidenced by the test results they provided.
Icon saved
At the beginning of the 20th century, during the period of persecution of the church, the icons were streaming, bleeding and miraculously renewed. The so-called wave of updates began with the territory of Ukraine and Belarus, and soon swept all the southern provinces of Russia. Skeptics tried to find an explanation for this by a simple focus of vision - they say, if you look at the icon for a long time and inseparably, then this will not seem like that. But what about the blackened, charred icon, which suddenly shone with all its colors?
Kizilsky miracle
This miracle happened in the Kizilsky convent in the Chelyabinsk region. About this in 2011, an Orthodox journalist Igor Kalugin made a film. The icon of Nicholas the Wonderworker, acquired by the holy monastery several years earlier, was miraculously renewed.
According to legend, before the revolution, the young pilgrim Xenophon went to the holy places from the village of Yeriyuvka. For a whole year he walked to Jerusalem. There he prayed earnestly at the Holy Sepulcher and returned back with the icon of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker. He bequeathed to his children to pass the icon from generation to generation. The first she went to his daughter Olga. She recalled how she hid her from the Komsomol members who arrived in the village to fight religious vestiges. A woman saved her icon so that one day she would save her children.
