The bells will be put on temporary display in the monastery yard.
The St. Daniel's Monastery ensemble of bells was put together over a period of two centuries. The largest of its three major bells, weighing about 12 tons, was cast in 1890 at the Finlandsky plant in Moscow.
In the 1930s, Soviet authorities closed the monastery down, and were planning to recast its bells. However, the U.S. industrialist Charles Crane struck a deal to buy the bells for the price of their bronze.
He then offered them as a gift to Harvard University, and in 1931 they were installed in the tower of a newly built campus dorm, Lowell House, to chime for a quarter of an hour every Sunday and holiday, as well as to signal football games.
Attempts to return the bells had been going on since the 1980s, but progress was made only in 2004, when the Svyaz Vremyon charity organization assumed all the costs to bring them home.
Making replicas of the bells was one of the terms of the deal, and the copies arrived in New York in late August.
Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Alexy II called the replicas "the best church art in modern history" and blessed them before their departure.
On September 12, the first bell returned to Moscow.
