Our Lady of the Dawn Gate
Dawn Gate · Vilnius, Lituania · desde 1626
The city door and the icon
Vilna - today Vilnius, capital of Lithuania - was for centuries a multi-ethnic and multi-faith city where Lithuanian, Polish, Belarusian, Jewish and Russian people lived together. The Gate of the Alba (in Lithuanian, Dawn Gate; en polaco, Sharp Gate) was one of the nine doors of the medieval wall of the city. In the chapel above the door an icon of the Virgin was installed from 1626, which would eventually become the most venerated of all the Baltic.
The icon - probably painted in the first quarter of the 17th century - represents the Virgin alone, without the Child, with her head bent and her hands crossed on her chest in a prayer attitude. It is an image of meditation and silence, very different from the most classic representation icons. The golden background and the crown of rays around the figure give him a serene majesty.
The miracle of 1671 and the brotherhood
In 1671, the first miracle attributed to the intercession of the Virgin of the Gate of the Alba was documented: a child who had fallen from the top of the chapel staircase and whose death seemed inevitable was collected from the unharmed ground. The ecclesiastical process that verified the fact opened a long chain of extraordinary cures and graces that the faithful were enclosing in the book of ex- vows of the sanctuary.
A sanctuary that transcends borders
The singularity of the Virgin of the Gate of the Dawn is that it unites in the same devotion communities that have been historically divided or in conflict. Lithuanian and Polish - whose relations have been complex over the centuries - share this sanctuary as their own. The Catholic and Orthodox Church take their faithful to the same place. It is one of the few shrines in the world where the same image is simultaneously venerated by multiple religious and national traditions.
Pope John Paul II visited the sanctuary in 1993, during his trip to the recently independent Baltic republics of the Soviet Union. His visit, full of personal emotion - Wojtyla was Polish and the Virgin of Vilna is part of the religious soul of Poland - confirmed the European and inclusive character of this devotion.
who guards all who enter without asking what people they come from,
Teach us to welcome the other as you welcome us all. Amen.