On every visit to exhibitions held at the Volyn Icon Museum, I cannot help but feel surprised: all these holy icons, which saw presidents, ambassadors, bishops, and other pilgrims from around the world coming to worship at them, actually started their lives of service at regular Volyn churches. So did this icon of St. Nicholas as well, which, having a wonderful history that sometimes resembles a real miracle, was once sitting in a small church in the village of Mykulychi, Volodymyr-Volynsky raion. This wooden church is a monument of sacral architecture, but it was built as late as 1880, while the icon of St. Nicholas, removed from it during a research expedition to Volynian places of worship in the 1980s, has been dated to the 16th century...
Surprisingly, the icon is actually containing... two pictures. The upper layer is The Gethsemane Prayer, a popular 19th century subject (the church was built in Mykulychi in that century). However, as paint was peeling in several places... it revealed another image. It took X-ray analysis to determine that the upper layer of paint was hiding a picture of St. Nicholas. Director of the Lviv Branch of the National Research and Restoration Center, People’s Artist of Ukraine Myroslav Otkovych said that it had been an extremely difficult case for restorers. Having been revealed, the icon of St. Nicholas, amazingly beautiful and spiritually powerful, led to new questions being asked. If it belongs to the 16th century, was it painted in the middle or at the end of it? The iconography technique points to it being a work of a non-Volynian artist, but it has pleased God to have this icon added to the Volyn Icon Museum’s collection, as what is likely to become one of the most interesting of its exhibits. Apart from St. Nicholas, the museum’s exhibition “New Life of Old Icons” features two dozen icons that have been restored in Lviv and Kyiv. This here is icon Elevation of the Holy Cross, painted by an unknown artist belonging to the Volyn iconography school in the 1630s; this icon of St. Paraskeva had the later layer removed by restorers, revealing the older painting, inscribed with its date of 1749... The museum houses up to 2,000 icons, and only 10 percent of them have been restored. Otkovych said that the Volyn Icon Museum was among the few in Ukraine to have such a collection, rich in culture and spirituality alike, and did a lot for moral education of the society. Director of Volyn Local History Museum Anatolii Syliuk told us that some of the other icons in the museum’s storage rooms also contained two pictures, like St. Nicholas. However, the discovery and study of their secrets are left for posterity, so that they will also get to see miracles, like visitors of the Volyn Icon Museum do now...
