TODAY IS THE FEAST OF THE FIRST AND SECOND FINDING OF THE HEAD OF JOHN THE BAPTIST

John the Baptist was a great fasting man - he led an austere life in the desert, ate only acridids (locusts) and wild honey, and was a preacher of repentance.  And it is very significant that his memory this year is celebrated on the eve of Lent. Let us pray to him that through his prayers we too may go through the process of Lent, that this time of salvation will not pass in vain for any of us, that on the eve of the feast of Christ's Resurrection we may feel purified and with a pure heart may meet the Risen Lord.

The relics of Saint John the Baptist have always had great importance, and his head was considered a special and very important shrine, which is why the Church celebrates all three discoveries of the head.

After the Baptist's martyrdom, his body was buried by his disciples; and the head, after Herodias had mocked it, the pious Joan, the wife of Herod's steward, Husa, secretly put it in a vessel and buried it in the Mount of Olives. Afterwards three times the holy head was discerned and the celebration of the three discernments of the head was established. For the first time it was discovered by two monks who were traveling to Jerusalem to worship in the holy places during the reign of Constantine the Great. The Baptist himself appeared to them and ordered them to dig up the head on the Mount of Olives. But soon the monks, by their lack of faith and neglect of the holy head, made themselves unworthy of possessing it. From them the head passed on to a citizen of the city of Ephesus in Syria, and from him in the succession it passed on to one Eustathius, an Arian monk, who hid it in a cave near Ephesus. Here afterwards a monastery was formed. To the abbot of this monastery, the pious archimandrite Markellos, the Baptist himself appeared in a dream and informed him of his head, hidden in a cave near the monastery. The head was found there a second time. This was in 452 when the chapter was transferred to Chalcedon and from there, under the emperor Theodosius the Great, to Constantinople. The third finding of the head of the Holy Forerunner was on June 7, which is when it is celebrated.

Parts of the honorable head of the Forerunner are in the monastery of St. Sylvester in Rome, in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus (by the way, the Baptist is venerated not only by Christians, but also by Muslims - as a great righteous man), in Nagorny Karabakh in Armenia, on Athos, and in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Amiens in France there is the face of the head.