NEWS STORY: `Wonder-Working’ Icon Returns Home to Russia

c. 2004 Religion News Service (UNDATED) The Gospel writer and early apostle Luke is believed to have painted it. For centuries, it was considered the source of miracles, protecting Russia from foreign invaders. It survived looting by the Soviets and the Nazis. And now, more than a half-century after it was smuggled to the United […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The Gospel writer and early apostle Luke is believed to have painted it. For centuries, it was considered the source of miracles, protecting Russia from foreign invaders. It survived looting by the Soviets and the Nazis.

And now, more than a half-century after it was smuggled to the United States by a Latvian bishop, the wonder-working Tikhvin Icon of the Mother of God is going home.


In a gesture of international goodwill, and a sign that a good child never forgets its mother, the Orthodox Church in America is returning one of the most revered icons in its faith to the Russian Orthodox Church _ the church that first sent Orthodox missionaries to America.

Metropolitan Vladimir of St. Petersburg visited Cleveland last week as part of the historic journey to retrieve the painting of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child. He said his “whole country is anxiously waiting for the icon. This is a historic event for the whole Orthodox world.”

How important is the icon to Russia?

After a farewell service in Chicago on Saturday (June 19), the Russian government sent a private plane to pick up Vladimir and the icon, which measures approximately 2 feet by 3 feet with a jewel-covered frame.

Some 150,000 people are expected to stand in line around the clock to venerate the icon during a short stay in Moscow. A tent city is being erected for the crowd of up to 200,000 people expected to be on hand for its return to the Tikhvin Monastery in northern Russia July 8-9.

There is a picture of the icon in every Russian Orthodox Church.

“That icon is almost like the Russian flag to the people,” Bishop Seraphim of Canada said during the metropolitan’s visit to Cleveland.

To the Orthodox, icons are seen as windows of the soul unto heaven. They depict religious scenes that are created to help individuals enter a spiritual world. An icon of Mary and Jesus, for example, can help make the Virgin Mary and Jesus present to the believer, according to Orthodox theology.

And this particular icon, a painting of Mary gesturing with her hands toward her infant son, is believed to have worked wonders for nearly two millennia.


The Apostle Luke is credited by tradition with painting the Tikhvin icon, which was taken from Jerusalem to Constantinople in the fifth century. In 1383, the icon is said to have appeared to Russian fishermen, hovering over a lake bathed in radiant light. This was interpreted as a sign from Mary that the icon should be moved before the fall of Constantinople.

The icon appeared later in the 14th century near the town of Tikhvin, in the St. Petersburg region of northern Russia, and a church and monastery enclosed by stone walls were built on the site. In the early 17th century, the Virgin Mary is believed to have offered special protection from Swedish invaders, and a copy of the icon was present when the two countries agreed to a peace treaty in 1617.

It was a miracle in itself to some that the icon survived the 20th century _ first that it was not stolen or sold by Soviet authorities and then that it was recovered after World War II from the Nazis, who had moved the icon from the Tikhvin Monastery to Riga, Latvia.

Stories differ as to how Bishop John of Riga obtained the icon. But not trusting the icon to be overseen by the Soviets, he brought it to the United States in 1949. He became archbishop of Chicago. He regularly displayed the icon in a Chicago cathedral and took it on pilgrimages throughout the United States.

It was such a visit to Cleveland in 1961 that changed the life of Basil Stoyka. The teenager was driving home from St. Theodosius Orthodox Cathedral when his car was broadsided by another vehicle, launching him from the front seat through the back window.

In the hospital, where he would be laid up for months, blindfolded to protect his sight, Stoyka said, he was sinking into a depression. Then he heard a hospital gurney being wheeled down the hall, and a commotion near his room. Archbishop John had heard about the accident and brought the icon _ so heavy it takes two or three men to lift _ to the hospital.


Despite the doctor’s objection, Stoyka said, he lifted the bandages off one eye and kissed the icon. “That icon became an inspiration for me,” Stoyka said.

He became a priest and now serves SS. Peter and Paul Church in Lorain, Ohio. “It lifted me all these years. The Lord came to me in the weakest moment in my life.”

It had always been the intention of Archbishop John, who died in 1982, to return the icon to Russia when it was safe to do so.

And the rebirth of the Russian Orthodox Church since the fall of communism convinced the Americans that the time had come to return the icon to the Tikhvin Monastery.

“We have freedom, full freedom, freedom we never had before,” Vladimir said during a visit to St. Michael’s Russian Orthodox Church in Broadview Heights, Ohio. “I’m an old man and I’ve never seen such a blossoming of spiritual life.”

KRE/PH END BRIGGS

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