The wooden, life-sized Black Nazarene, carved in Mexico and brought to the Philippines in the early 17th century, is taken out of the Quiapo Church on Jan. 9 each year for the largest known religious procession in the predominantly Roman Catholic country.
Thousands more lined the streets to see the icon, dressed in maroon robes and paraded in a wooden carriage, in a festival that has been held in the former Spanish enclave for more than 200 years.
“The Black Nazarene gives us strength,” said Zenaida Villasanta, 47, who traveled from the province with her two sisters to pray for another sick sibling. “We are praying that He will heal my sister. She has cancer and we pray for a miracle,” she said.
Another devotee, Bernard Ponce, said he had joined the procession for two years to ask the Nazarene for another child.
It’s tiring, but after you go on the procession, you feel really good,” Ponce said. “It feels like a heavy weight is lifted, as if you’re starting a new life.”
The procession snaked through some of the oldest and narrowest streets of Manila with devotees pushing and shoving their way to touch the Black Nazarene.
“This is beautiful, unexpected,” Elena Zhirnova, a Russian tourist on her first visit to Manila, said. “I didn’t know about this tradition and suddenly I come and see this ceremony. It’s very nice. It’s very new for me,” she said. The Black Nazarene is also paraded through the streets on Good Friday.
“They look like giant waves,” Senior Inspector Oscar Hoguera, head of Manila’s mobile police division, said of the sea of humanity swarming around the carriage being pulled by barefoot devotees holding lengths of stout rope.
“There are a lot more participants today than last year,” Holguera said estimating the size of the crowd at several hundred thousand people.
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