The National Sanctuary Sophia of Kyiv is hosting an exhibit, “My Most Blessed Queen of Heaven,” of embroidered icons made by the traditional folk art master Tetiana Balan. The exhibit displays 50 tapestries, including some new works, such as the icons of the Holy Virgin of Iver, Pochaiv, and The Sign; the images of Saint Equal-to-the-Apostles Princess Olha, Saint Mary Magdalene, and Saint Pantaleon the Healer; the picture Zarvanytsia; and many others.
“The icon is supposed to unite man and God. It fills the eternal gap between them with its beauty,” the embroideress says, explaining the philosophical meaning of her oeuvre.
Tetiana Balan never uses dark colors or too rough cross-stitches in her works. “In Ukraine, Father Dmytro Blazhijovsky is considered the best master of traditional cross-stitching. He is also a role model for me, but his embroidery seem too ‘masculine’ to me, so even if I take some of his works as a model, I try to change the concept – I add bright glass beads, gold color threads, and flowery ornaments. I want my favorite Holy Virgin motifs to lie on the canvas in a feminine way,” Balan notes. “Blazhijovsky’s merit is not so much an enormous collection of his own embroidered icons and the patterns he has designed as the fact that he has brought an image embroidered under his not-so-intricate design into every Ukrainian house, even in the remote areas.”
As the wife of a diplomat, Balan stayed abroad for a long time. “The culture of some African countries does not allow a woman, especially a white one, to stroll down the streets for too long, so I would spend all my free time embroidering icons. Naturally, there are very few Orthodox temples there, but still I left a work of mine in one of them so it could perform its primary function,” she says. To get down to this work, one must have a tremendous spiritual strength, since it is not just about simple birds on canvas. For this reason, a prayer is the best way to resist the temptation to abandon this work.
The master is planning to embroider the images of the Ukrainian saint princes Volodymyr and Yaroslav the Wise, while the icon of Princess Olha is already being exhibited. “For some reason, it was especially difficult to embroider this image: the canvas was always studded with white incomplete blotches. I have a rule which I would advise every Ukrainian statesman to obey: do not give up what you have begun!”
Tetiana Balan not just copies readymade patterns: she adds her own motifs and studies the years-long tradition of icon embroidering.
“Interestingly, Ukrainian Orthodoxy adheres to the tradition of the so-called peasant icon, i.e., one embroidered with glass beads on the velvet tissue of icon mountings. Under this technique, the saints have their faces and hands painted, while their attire is a mounting embroidered by a master,” Balan says and adds: “An old-type embroidered icon is kept at the Metropolitan’s Palace of the Kyivan Cave Monastery. The image of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker was done by the mother of Volodymyr, the current Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), when he was applying to a seminary. Unfortunately, the tradition of icon embroidering is losing its spiritual grip today: the market is getting more and more flooded with run of the mill icons, where the embroiderer is only to sew a bead of the required color onto a painted canvas. “Embroidering icons should be a joint effort of human hands, intellect, and heart, for you will only find inner strength if you fully devote yourself to this work. Yet the fact that there are so many types of embroidered icons in Ukraine shows that the Ukrainian society really needs a prayer,” the embroideress admits.
Noting that embroidered icons possess the power of pulling a human being out of chaos, which more than one generation of embroideresses have claimed, the Ukrainian traditional folk art master says: “The exploit of blessed people is that they are able to leave this fussy and vain city for a cloister. But for those who are too closely tied to a city, embroidery remains, perhaps, the only opportunity to find peace for their souls.”
