| Las campanas
| When the monastery was closed in 1929 and 1930, its bell set was saved from Communist melting through the purchase by American industrialist Charles R. Crane. The largest of the bells, Bolshoi (or The Big One - called The Mother Earth Bell at Harvard), weighs 13 tons and has a 700-pound clapper. The smallest weighs just 22 pounds. Crane donated the bells to Harvard University and they were installed in the main tower of Harvard's Lowell House and at the Harvard Business School's Baker Library. Beginning in the 1980s, with openness under Gorbachev, there were calls to return the bells, and after numerous meetings over the years, the bells were returned to the Russian Orthodox Church in the fall of 2008. Russian industrialist Viktor Vekselberg, famous for buying up a number of Faberge Eggs, agreed to pay for the repatriation of the 18 bells and for the cost of casting replacements of them in Russia to be hung at Harvard. The first of the bells, known as the Everyday (or Weekday) Bell, weighing 2.2 tons, arrived at the Danilov Monastery on September 12, 2007; the remaining seventeen were returned on September 12, 2008. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danilov_Monastery) |
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