An Icon's Journey Through History

a tale of miracles, 

revolution,

flight

and, finally,

reconciliation

On May 17, 2007, the Moscow Patriarchate will be formally reconciled with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), ending their bitter, 85-year estrangement.  When the two churches sign the Act of Canonical Communion at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior on that day, ecclesiastic hatchets will be buried, and the “Kursk Root Icon,” the icon most closely identified with the Russian diaspora, will begin a new, uncertain chapter in its storied history. 

According to official Orthodox accounts, the Kursk Root Icon was destined for renown.  On September 8, 1295, a small band of hunters walked through a forest of white birch and oak near the city of Kursk, a city that had recently been sacked by the forces of Batu Khan. One hunter stopped to examine an object lying at the roots of a large tree. When he lifted it, he saw that it was an icon of the Virgin Mary in the style of the northern, free city of Novgorod. What happened next, according to the medieval chronicles of the Russian Orthodox Church, was a miracle: from the very spot the icon had lain, a “spring of pure water gushed forth.” 

The icon has been a font of the miraculous ever since, earning it the title of “wonder-working” (or chudotvornaya) from the Russian Orthodox Church.  Soon after its discovery, the people brought the icon to the neighboring city of Rylsk for veneration and enshrinement in that city’s cathedral, but the icon mysteriously vanished, reappearing once again in a humble wooden shrine the hunters had built in the forest. When invading Tatars swept through Kursk in 1385, the icon was hacked in two, but then “healed” itself with the aid of a pious priest. 

News of these miracles and testimonials of the icon’s curative powers reached Tsar Fyodor (the pious son of Ivan the Terrible), and the icon was summoned to Moscow, where it took on a new imperial look and significance. Tsaritsa Irina gave the simple wooden icon a more regal appearance by having it set in a larger frame with depictions of God the Father and the nine prophets who foretold Christ’s birth. The tsaritsa also had it covered with a “riza“ – a sparkling, gem-encrusted, silver and gold overlay to protect the wooden panel beneath. 

In fulfillment of a promise made to the Virgin Mary in the heat of battle against the Poles, the citizens of Kursk built a new home for the icon, Znamensky Monastery (1615). And, after the people of Kursk petitioned Tsar Mikhail, the icon was returned to the city and installed in its new home three years later. Perhaps fearing that the icon would fade into provincial obscurity, the tsar immediately initiated, by edict, a new tradition in Kursk, a tradition that lasted, with various interruptions, from 1618 to 1917, and evolved into a hugely popular, wildly colorful spectacle. Twice a year, a processional brought the icon from the Znamensky Monastery in the city of Kursk to the Korenskaya (Root) Hermitage some eight miles north.  Eventually, this event attracted tens of thousands of pilgrims, making it one of the largest church processionals in all of Russia. 

Archbishop Serafim, a native of Kursk who as a child watched the preparations for the procession from his window, recalled: “beginning with Ascension Day, the Blessed Icon was brought around the city day and night, and the residents said good-bye to their Holy Intercessor.”  Serafim describes the groups of pilgrims who flooded the city, attaching distinctive ribbons, flowers or branches to their walking sticks, which they held high above their heads for easy recognition. Wooden stalls were assembled for an open-air market where food, antiques, and gold and silver-threaded embroidery would be sold. Before the city’s cathedral, twelve large torches with silver-plated poles were placed. Pilgrims hung offerings of kerchiefs and homespun decorative linens from these poles, while monks sat nearby, selling candles and receiving offerings. The widely held belief that tooth pain could be alleviated by wriggling through this line of decorated torches no doubt added a bit of comedy to the scene. 

On the night before the processional, Serafim said, there was a magical all-night vigil:  tens of thousands of candles, a hundred-voiced cathedral choir and sweet perfume of the linden trees filled the air. 

A less magical version of the Kursk Root processional was immortalized in the painting Kursk Church Processional (1880-83) by the Russian Itinerant painter Ilya Repin. The icon, encased in gold and decorated with ribbons, is held aloft by a group of monks while the lame and impoverished pilgrims progress under the watchful gaze of whip-wielding authorities. 

Some of Russian history’s key players believed in the icon’s great power: Boris Godunov “bestowed many gifts for the adornment of the icon”; False Dmitry kept it near him in his Kremlin chambers. The crown princes Ivan and Peter Alexeyevich (soon to be Peter the Great) issued a command that the icon be “borne wherever Orthodox warriors went into battle.”  The icon appeared as a vision before the Don Cossacks as they readied for battle against the Turks.  Kutuzov’s army carried it aloft in their campaign against Napoleon.

Come the Bolshevik Revolution, the Kursk icon became a target for anti-monarchist wrath. So the defeated White Army secreted the icon out of the country in the 1920s, where it came under the protection of 13 exiled bishops and clergymen residing in Serbia. These men severed their ties with a Moscow Patriarchate they felt they could no longer trust and founded their own church, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. In their hands, the Kursk Root Icon acquired a new name and symbolic function: “Protectress of the Russian Diaspora.” 

More war and the westward drift of émigré populations brought the icon from Serbia to Germany, then across the Atlantic in 1957 to the small town of Mahopec, New York, where the exiled Prince and Princess Beloselsky donated their forested estate as the icon’s North American home. In less than 20 years, the icon left its upstate retreat for Manhattan’s Upper East Side at ROCOR’s chandeliered headquarters, the Synodal Cathedral of Our Lady of the Sign. 

These days, the icon spends much of its time on the road, in countless processions before the faithful in major cities and small towns around the globe.  Last fall, the itinerant icon visited Wayne, West Virginia (population 1,154). 

One cannot help asking, whether this icon, which purportedly healed itself when split in two centuries before, will become a symbol for the two churches’ unification. Now that the churches are one, will the icon go back to Kursk? 

It is a freighted question – one so controversial that, according to Izvestia, church officials forbade Russian reporters from asking it when a ROCOR delegation visited Kursk in 2004.

Dmitry Tourich, a young, dark-haired ROCOR monk in a long, dark cassock, answers indirectly, “It’s simply the most important icon for Russian Orthodox living abroad. It’s the pathfinder (putevoditelnitsa) that shows us how to live in the future. It’s a part of old Russia and it connects us with the past.”

Father Daniel Marshall, a young Midwestern priest with a long beard and wire-rimmed glasses, doubts that the icon will ever return permanently to Russia, since it provides a spiritual and symbolic bridge to ROCOR’s pre-revolutionary past.

“This icon has been present at every major event in the Church’s history,” Marshall said. “Present at all the meetings of the bishops. It was with the White Army when they evacuated the country after the revolution… For them, the icon became a beacon, a guide, a source of hope, and it remains that for us today.”

Lydia Gromykhalina, a teacher of Russian at ROCOR’s seminary in Jordanville, New York, said “That’s a very difficult question. I think the icon will eventually go back, but that now is not the time.”  RL