For some years the body was allowed to remain in the church for the want of an appropriate shrine in which it might be preserved. In 1371 Lewis of Hungary, accompanied by his mother and Elizabeth, his wife, came on a visit to Zara. After viewing the saintly body of Simeon, Elizabeth, desiring to take with her some memento of the wonder-worker, broke a finger from one of the hands and hid it in her bosom. For this sacrilege St. Simeon punished her by striking her blind on the spot, caused her hand, the one with which she had taken the finger, to wither, and caused her breast, where she had hid the relic, to mortify. Frantic with the sudden loss of her sight, Elizabeth tried to flee from the church but was unable to find the door. She groped her way back to the casket, fell upon her knees and replaced the stolen finger, which immediately united itself to the proper hand, the Queen’s sight being restored the same moment. Again Elizabeth implored the forgiveness of the Saint and promised to present him with a silver casket in which his body might repose more comfortably than she thought it did in its wooden resting place. The story goes that this promise so reconciled the prophet that Elizabeth’s breast was healed forthwith and her withered hand was made whole. When the Queen returned to her home she communicated with certain nobles in Zara with regard to the casket, and in 1377 her agents commissioned one Francesco d’Antonio di Milano, a goldsmith, to proceed with the work. By the time he had completed his task, three years later, he had used nearly a thousand pounds of silver metal, and he received twenty-eight thousand ducats as pay from Elizabeth. Nearly two hundred years passed before any attempt was made to raise funds for the erection of a suitable temple in which to place permanently the silver sarcophagus containing the body of so famous a saint; money was slow in coming in, and in 1600, after the façade of the building was half finished, the work was abandoned. In 1543 the old church of St. Maria was demolished to make room for new fortifications. The silver casket was then given to the nuns for safe-keeping, while the body of the Saint had been transferred to its original ark of cypress wood and left in a little chapel near by. At length Archbishop Garzadori proposed that the body be replaced in the silver casket and taken to the church of St. Stefano which stood in the immediate vicinity. About this time an outbreak of the plague tended to remind the superstitious of their neglect of the body of St. Simeon and a new chancel was hurriedly placed in the church, the silver ark, which had been found stained and tarnished in the nunnery, was repaired by a goldsmith of the name of Benedetto Libani, and on May 16th, 1632, the translation of the body took place amid public rejoicing. Since that date St. Simeon has reigned as the patron saint of Zara.