Yangon, Myanmar ? Nearly 1,000 Buddhist monks, joined by thousands of their countrymen, marched in Myanmar’s largest city Thursday in the biggest challenge in at least a decade to the iron-fisted junta, a show of strength rare under military rule.

Authorities normally quick to crack down hard on dissent left the marchers alone, apparently wary of stirring up further problems. The monks said they would march again next week.

Processions of monks converged from various monasteries around Yangon in the early afternoon at the golden hilltop Shwedagon pagoda, the country’s most revered shrine. They prayed there before embarking on a more than three-hour march through Yangon in steady rain, gathering supporters as they went.

Monks at the head of the procession carried religious flags and an upside-down alms bowl, a symbol of protest.

Some monks are refusing alms from the military and their families – a religious boycott deeply embarrassing to the junta.

The government appeared to be handling the situation gingerly, aware that any action seen as mistreating the monks could ignite public outrage. They are aware that restraining monks poses a dilemma, because monks are highly respected in predominant Buddhist Myanmar, and abusing them in any manner could cause public outrage.

Thursday was the third straight day that monks have marched in Yangon. Their activities have given new life to a protest movement that began a month ago after a huge government-ordered increase in fuel prices.

The protests express long pent-up opposition to the repressive regime and have become the most sustained challenge to the junta since a wave of student demonstrations that were forcibly suppressed in December 1996.

The junta’s crackdown on the protesters has drawn increasing criticism from world leaders, including U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and President Bush. They have called for the government to release opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has been under house arrest for more than 11 of the past 18 years.