 Seven people were injured on Thursday when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a dispute over how to clean the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
| Cheeze. It's gotta be something in the water... |
| ... and they made a bigger mess to clean ... |
Following the Christmas celebrations, Greek Orthodox priests set up ladders to clean the walls and ceilings of their part of the church, which is built over the site where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born. But the ladders encroached on space controlled by Armenian priests, according to photographers who said angry words ensued and blows quickly followed. For a quarter of an hour bearded and robed priests laid into each other with fists, brooms and iron rods while the photographers who had come to take pictures of the annual cleaning ceremony recorded the whole event.
| "Whoa! This is great!... Smile, Father!... Oooh! That hadda hurt!" |
A dozen unarmed Palestinian policemen were sent to try to separate the priests, but two of them were also injured in the unholy melee.
"It's the coppers!"
"Get 'em!" |
"As usual the cleaning of the church afer Christmas is a cause of problems," Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh told AFP, adding that he has offered to help ease tensions. "For the two years that I have been here everything went more or less calmly," he said. "It's all finished now."
The Church of the Nativity, like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem's Old City, is shared by various branches of Christianity, each of which controls and jealously guards a part of the holy site. Been to both of them. They're pretty small and the space is shared by many groups - the Armenians among the oldest continuing caretakers keep finding their space eroded by pushier newcomers who only arrived in the 4th century.
I wonder if the lovely mosaics in the Church of the Nativity were badly damaged by the Paleo thugs who pissed on them in contempt while occupying the sanctuary a while back. |
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