The original Weeping Madonna was found in 1969

During the Turkish occupation of the late 1600s, the town of Sajópálfala in northeastern Hungary was destroyed and deserted.

Not long after Rusyn Greek Catholics resettled the area, the painting of the Madonna and Child in their village church perspired and wept bloody tears, from January 6 to February 16, 1717.

The investigating bishop took the picture to Eger, where it stayed in the Franciscan church until the Communists dissolved the religious orders in 1950. Then the painting was lost to the faithful of Sajópálfala, who had made an annual pilgrimage to Eger on the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows.

In 1969, they located the original weeping image in a church in the diocese of Pécs, where a friar had taken it when the Eger monastery closed. On October 25, 1973, after 256 years, the Weeping Madonna returned to the Church of the Visitation in Sajópálfala, where the main pilgrimage days are now Pentecost Sunday and the third Sunday in October.

Erika Papp Faber

In Our Mother's Tears: Ten Weeping Madonnas in Historic Hungary, Academy of the Immaculate, New Bedford, MA, 2006

The church’s website