« Reply #7 on: November 20, 2017, 05:26:00 PM »
Okay, so this is not that unusual; what really got my attention was this bit at the end: The Patriarch himself is approaching his own finitude, having turned 71 years old today.
To mark the occasion, the Patriarch was gifted a puppet of Saint Tikhon, who headed the Russian church a century ago, the Interfax news agency reports.
I don't speak Russian, but if you follow the links and don't go for the automatic translation, it seems "puppet" may be a (bad) translation of "koukoulion", the patriarchal headdress.
Edit: I could very well be wrong.
No, you're right. The word for "puppet" (кукла) is very similar to the word for "koukoulion" (куколь), and a cursory glance makes me think they descend from the same root.
spoilsport....it was more fun imagining him being handed a giant puppet and trying to figure out what to think of it or do with it
Indeed. The thought of His Holiness with a bewildered expression surveying one of the giant paper mache puppets of doom Catholics and Episcopalians like to use in their services was amusing.
I read on an Orthodox website a blistering condemnation of the use of such giant puppets in the liturgy, derived from the use of this kind of puppet to mock Russian Orthodox clergy and other Czarist authority figures in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution.

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