The cathedral of Aachen, in Germany, has just reopened after two and a half months of work. During this break, one of its treasures has been patiently restored to be presented to visitors. Long before being exposed, he found himself in the heat of media attention. Because this reliquary in gold, bronze and ivory, almost a meter high and 98 kg, which reproduces a Byzantine church, conceals the remains of a martyrdom become by homonymy a celebrity in spite of herself: Saint Corona.
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It was obviously not her who gave the virus its name. “Corona” means “the crowned one” in Latin - “Stephana”, in Greek. However, the infectious agent observed under a microscope has precisely the shape of a crown.
The different accounts of Saint Corona are rather imprecise. She could have been born either in 161, or in 287, and would have belonged to a group of martyrs. Perhaps she was even the wife of one of them, a soldier named Victor, who came from a Turkish region called
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