Church battles- Bava and Methran

The wikimapia.org site is real cool one. I located my home in Allapra on the satellite image. It really felt good. The image from above gives us a very different view. The roads are more curved than I thought and the area is so much greener. Most of the houses including my own are not visible due to the trees. When we came to Allapra, the St. Jacob’s church there was very small and cozy. Last year it was renovated actually another church was built in its place. It is so huge and so beautiful almost majestic. The coziness is gone, but it is still beautiful. The church being close to the main road is more accessible to people but somehow it has not been able to match the popularity of the St. Mary’s church in Thurithiply. At Thurithiply during the Ettu Nombu the place is filled with pilgrims who come to the church from far off places to see the relic of Virgin Mary called the Sunoro. Both the churches belong to the Jacobite patriarch section (Patrichis Kakshi). Thankfully St. Mary’s remained outside the fight between the two divisions, though St. Jacob’s has not been so fortunate. The Thurithy family has orthodox sympathies, and they tried to start a fight for the church. This ended in the death of a young boy of the Patrichis Kakshi, which resulted in the revenge killing of a man from Methran Kakshi. The second happened to be our cousin (Thombra). Church wars can be unbelievably vicious. One would think that the elders in the church would try to calm the others down instead often it is they would fan the flames the furthest.