Weirdest story of the day. Maybe even of the week. A monk was trying to board a flight when baggage checkers opened up his bags and found…
Reuters reports:
A Cypriot monk caught at a Greek airport with the skeletal remains of a nun in his baggage on the weekend told authorities he was taking the relics of a saint back to his monastery.
The 56-year-old Cypriot was detained at Athens airport on Sunday after security staff discovered a skull wrapped in cloth and skeletal remains in a sheet inside his baggage.
“They maintained it was a woman who was a saint,” a Greek police official who declined to be named told Reuters on Tuesday, adding that the monk told authorities he was transferring her remains to a monastery in Cyprus.
The problem? She’s not a saint.
The monk dug her up himself. The remains were those of a nun who had died a few years before. But I repeat she wasn’t a saint. So the monk was charged with charges like theft that aren’t that hard to live down but he was also charged with a crime that will likely be a job application killer in the future such as “desecrating the dead.”
You want an awkward silence in any room you recount the time you got sent up river for desecrating a dead nun.
According to news reports, he was suspended from his monastic duties. I think that was probably a wise course of action. But you want to hear an odd little note to the story – desecrating the dead is only a misdemeanor in Greece. Who’d a thunk it?
So the moral of the story here is that when you’re stealing dead nuns you don’t want to fly. You rent a car or take a ferry but don’t try to go through airport security. You could hitch hike. I mean, seriously, I think 79% of hitch hikers have human remains in their backpacks and they never get caught. Just sayin’.
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