The Kansas City sun. (Kansas City, Mo.) 1908-1924, 1916-04-22

does not coincide with that of the western
churches, holy week in Jerusalem is celebrated
~predominantly according to the Greek calendar,
the services of the other churches being repeated
on their own dates.
In all the Greek orthodox countries-Russia
Roumania, Greece. Bulgaria, Servia, Montenegro,
and a large part of is
celebrated with great fervor and devotion. The
Easter kiss is a well-known incident of these
celebrations.
Jerusalem is naturally full of churches, monas.
teries, hospices and hospitals of the various
creeds. and every one of them at Easter brings
out its own peculiar religious individuality. The
Latin church, for instance, whose establishment
in Jerusalem harks back to Godfrey dc Bouillon
and his crusaders, has a number Of oriental
Churches united to Tie Roman Catholic church.
Thus there are the United Greeks. the United
Syrians, the United HISTORIANS, the United Ar.
menians, the Maronites, all of whom celebrate
mass in their own tongue and so add in their
ceremonies and garb a picturesque distinctive
ness to the whole.
Then there are the Copts, the Armenians, the
Syrian J%acobites, the HISTORIANS, the Abyssinians,
besides Greeks and Professionals. The relative
standing of the various churches is in a measure
expressed in the way they share the is lamps
that burn in the Holy Sepulcher chapel, which
is in the center of the stone that was rolled away
from Jesus grave by the angels. Five of these
lamps belong to the Latins, five to the Greeks,
four to the Armenians and one to the Copts.
Away from the ecclesiastical ceremonial the
pilgrim in Easter time seeks the traditional
places where our Lord spent his last days and
nights. OF these Gethsemane is the principal
goal, and here the difference in creed among the
many visitors is obliterated by an earnest and
quiet devotion which is unexpectedly free from
the emotional.
Another figure has a prominent place in Easter
celebrations in Jerusalem; that of Moses, whose
liberation of the Jewish people from the yoke OF
Egypt is commemorated in the ancient Hebrew
paschal feast.
There is a very little known M~ohammedan
celebration which, though no longer so general as
formerly, is still a most interesting one. To
the ~Mohammedan, il must be remembered, Jeru-
salem is a holy city, like Mecca and Medina, and
there is a saying among Arabs, Syria is the
blessed county, Palestine the holy land, and Je-
rusalem, the holy city. is the holy of holies.'
Native and pilgrims make up
a procession and issue from the Sitti Myriam
gate. They are Joined by throngs of their breth-
rem from the neighboring villages, and, amid the
widest enthusiasm, with standards being borne
aloft and to the typical Arab music of drum and
fife, the pilgrimage proceeds in the direction of
the Dead sea.
As the Arabs claim common descent with the
Jews from Abraham, the Holy Land holds ira.
ditions equally sacred to them. Jerusalem is
second only to Mecca in sanctity because 1t con-
tains, according to tradition, the rock of Abra-
hams sacrifice, over which the famed mosque of
Omar is built. The Arab pilgrimage to the burial
place of Moses recalls the similar one to the tomb
of Noah, near the ruins of Baalbek, a short dis
lance from Damascus.
In cosmopolitan charm Easter in Constantinople
almost equals that found in Jerusalem. The capital
of the Turkish empire is, of course, in itself highly
cosmopolitan; and there is no other city in the
world where SO many languages are heard in the
streets, not by foreigners. but by the variegated
native population. The background here is not
Jewish and Mohammedan, as in Jerusalem, but
and Christian. with a strong tinge
of Spanish Jewry.