Lost for over a century, a Russian icon reappears

One day in 1930, Pavlov, a White Russian who had fled to Paris to escape the Bolsheviks, was passing along the rue Saint-Honoré and stopped, fascinated, in front of an antique shop window. It took him a moment to work out what had caught his eye: in a corner of the display, stripped of its gold, silver, pearl and precious stone trim, revealing only the face and hands, lay a large ancient icon of Mary Odoghitria ("Showing the Way", in Greek). The holy image was dirty and damaged. Suddenly, he recognised the Theotokos Iverskaya, patron saint of Moscow, who had disappeared in 1812 after the city burned down! The journey to restore it and offer it again to the veneration of the faithful woul be long, but also strewn with signs from Heaven.

Les raisons d'y croire :

• The icon of the Virgin Iverskaya had officially been missing since the end of the summer of 1812, when the French arrived in Moscow and the city burned down. Of course, the imperial authorities claimed to have kept the holy image safe, but then why did the monks of Mount Athos have to make a copy of it when they rebuilt the chapel? In fact, no one knows whether the holy image disappeared in the flames or whether it was one of the objects stolen by French troops during the sacking of Moscow. What is certain is that for more than a century, no one could say what had become of it.

• The original may have been lost, but its copy was well known to Muscovites, and indeed to all Russians, since greeting it as one entered the city was a ritual that almost everyone obeyed, and because copies of it hang in family iconostases and were in numerous books. So it was highly recognizable, provided you had a religious or artistic background, which Pavlov did.

• Like almost all the Russian refugees in Paris, Pavlov fled his country without taking anything with him. Painfully surviving in exile, often lacking even the bare necessities, he had no time to stroll around antique shops, let alone the means to buy anything. But his improbable looking in this shop window, his eyes drawn to this dusty icon, was in itself providential.

• Pavlov entered the shop, although it is obvious that he couldn't afford to buy anything, and asked the shopkeeper where he got the icon and how it came to be in Paris. What the shopkeeper told him reinforced his certainty that he had  in front of him the authentic image, stolen by a French officer in 1812 before the Russians had time to burn down the chapel and remove the precious objects.

• This officer in the armies of the Revolution despised everything to do with Christianity; if he seized the icon and saved it from the flames, it was because the painting was covered in a coating of gold, pearls and precious stones, revealing only the faces and hands of the Virgin and Child, and he intended to sell it when he returned to France. However, for reasons unknown, instead of later disposing of the icon, the officer kept it, and the image remained in his family for over a century before his descendants decided to sell it.

• There is an undeniably miraculous aspect to the icon's survival and the fact that it reappeared at that precise moment, as if to bring consolation to its faithful, through a Russian exile who was able to identify it and who did everything he could to return it to Orthodox veneration.

• The story was plausible enough for Pavlov to go to the Russian church in Paris and inform the religious leaders that he thought he has found the Iverskaya. Deeply moved, Metropolitan Eulogy immediately considered buying back the icon. However, he first sought the advice of an expert who, after examination, confirmed the age of the pigments in the painting and its wooden support. After this, saving the Iverskaya became a priority for the exiled Russian community.

• Unfortunately, the arrival of the expert tipped the antique dealer off. Realising that he held a work of art of great value, he agreed to sell it for the then astronomical price of 250,000 francs (the equivalent of a thousand months' salary), giving him a year to raise the money... Unfortunately, despite everyone's efforts and generosity, the sum needed to buy it back had not been raised by the deadline, and the icon had to be returned to the shopkeeper, who announced his intention to auction it shortly. All seemed lost.

• That same year, 1931, another Orthodox prelate, Bishop Benjamin Fedchenkov, with a reputation for sanctity, decided to open a new place of worship, the Church of the Three Holy Doctors. The news that the Iverskaya had been returned to the second-hand dealer upset the bishop, who saw it as a sacrilege. He begged the Virgin Mary to help him get his image back... Although he didn't have the money, Bishop Fedtchenkov went to the antique dealer in the hope of getting an extension or a reduction in the price.

• The shopkeeper would have none of it. The bishop implored him to let him see the icon one last time. Although he claimed to hold it as his most precious treasure, the bishop discovered that the merchant had taken it down to the cellar and placed it in a dark, damp corner, where he had ostensibly put it upside down, which the holy man interpreted as a deliberate attempt at desecration and blasphemy. In an act of reparation, the bishop fell to his knees before the Virgin and began to weep loudly, reproaching himself for his inability to find the money.

• Suddenly, Bishop Fedchenkov clearly heard a female voice say to him: "Why do you doubt? Where is your faith?" He was certain that these words were coming from the icon and that the Mother of God had just spoken to him through it. Bishop Fedtchenkov was very pious, but the only miracle he wished for was to find generous donors. He was not the type to invent miraculous voices, especially as this one didn't solve his money problem.

• However, it seems that the bishop was not the only one to hear the icon speak, and that the antique dealer also heard the mysterious woman's voice. Now, Mr Cohen was Jewish and did not seem to have any sympathy for Christian beliefs, let alone for holy images that contravene the Jewish ban on representation.

• However, he changed his attitude completely, lowered his price to 30,000 francs and agreed to a payment schedule with no interest and no deadline. Better still, he immediately handed the Iverskaya to Bishop Fedtchenkov and asked him to take it with him, so that it could be displayed that very evening in the Church of the Three Holy Doctors, where it has since been solemnly venerated. This change of mind is inexplicable, unless the Virgin intervened and touched the antique dealer's heart.

• All that remained was to find the money. This was a difficult task, as the vain efforts of the previous year had shown. In addition to the financial problems, there were the quarrels undermining the exiled Russian community, divided into antagonistic factions that tore each other apart instead of uniting and working together in the general interest. However, the fund-raising for the Iverskaya, which had failed 1930, was unexpectedly successful in 1931, and helped to reconcile all these fractious groups around the Theotokos.

• In January 1932, the icon was definitively returned to the devotion of the faithful. This surge of faith, as well as the prayers and sacrifices that made it possible, constitutes, by its strength and duration, proof in itself of the miraculous nature of the re-discovery.