The Wonderworking Icons of the Theotokos

Orthodox tradition venerates a number of icons of the Mother of God as thaumatourgos — “wonderworking” — associated with healings, deliverances of cities, and other marvels. This file surveys the greatest of them (Vladimir, Kazan, Iveron, Tikhvin, and others), reporting each origin story as tradition, pinning it to its earliest datable attestation, and distinguishing art-historical fact from pious attribution in the manner the Church’s honesty requires.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (with Russian and Athonite emphasis)

The Orthodox Church has never held that a wonderworking icon works wonders of itself. As the theology of the image insists, the honor — and any grace — passes through the image to its prototype and to God, who is glorified in His Mother and His saints (see iconographic-types.md). The accounts gathered below are therefore reported as what the tradition and its named sources attest, not as verified history: hagiographical narratives are pinned to their earliest written attestation, and legendary attributions of authorship or antiquity are flagged as such, in keeping with the Church’s own long practice of distinguishing what is believed from what is documented (on the nature of such reception, see ../../orthodoxy/02-sources-of-theology/holy-tradition.md).

The Vladimir icon (Vladimirskaya)

The Vladimir Mother of God is the most revered icon in the Russian tradition and one of the finest surviving Byzantine panels. It is an Eleousa (Umilenie) of exceptional tenderness, the Child pressing His cheek to His Mother’s while she gazes outward in sorrowful foreknowledge.

[Apocryphal: the tradition that the icon was painted by the Evangelist Luke from the living Virgin is pious legend, not fact. Art historians date the surviving panel to the **early twelfth century** (c. 1100–1130), the work of a Constantinopolitan master; only the faces are the original Byzantine paint, the rest having been repainted in later restorations. See David Talbot Rice and standard catalogues of the State Tretyakov Gallery, where the icon is now kept.]

The historical career of the icon is better attested than its origin. Tradition holds it was sent from Constantinople to Kiev in the first half of the twelfth century; Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky removed it to Vladimir (from which it takes its name) around 1155, building the Dormition Cathedral there to house it. In 1395 it was carried to Moscow as the army of Tamerlane (Timur) advanced; when Timur unexpectedly turned back, the deliverance was credited to the Mother of God through her icon, and the day was kept as a feast (Russian chronicle tradition; see the summaries in Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution, Oxford University Press, 2004). The icon thereafter served as a palladium of Muscovy, present at the coronation of tsars and the election of patriarchs. It now resides in the church of St. Nicholas in Tolmachi, attached to the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

The Kazan icon (Kazanskaya)

The Kazan Mother of God is a small Hodegetria that became, with Vladimir, a national palladium of Russia. By the tradition recorded soon after the events — including an account attributed to Hermogenes, then a priest in Kazan and later Patriarch of Moscow — the icon was discovered in 1579 in the ashes of a house fire in Kazan after a girl named Matrona was thrice directed to it in a dream, found buried in the ground and undamaged (Hermogenes’ narrative, 1594; discussed in Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution).

The Kazan icon is bound to two great deliverances in the national memory: the liberation of Moscow from Polish occupation in 1612, when a copy accompanied the militia of Minin and Pozharsky, and the campaign of 1812 against Napoleon. The original icon was stolen in 1904 from the Kazan convent that housed it; the thief, Varfolomei Chaikin (Stoyan), was caught and confessed to having stripped its precious riza (metal cover) and destroyed the panel, though a persistent popular hope that the original survived has attached itself to several later copies. The much-traveled copy returned to Russia by the Vatican in 2004 is one such venerated image, not the lost sixteenth-century original — a distinction the record requires. [Disputed: the fate of the 1579 original is contested — the court testimony of 1904 records its destruction, while some devotional accounts hold that a genuine early copy was saved; no surviving panel is securely identifiable as the original.]

The Iveron icon (Portaitissa) of Mount Athos

The Iveron (Iviron) icon, called Portaitissa (Πορταΐτισσα, “the Keeper of the Gate” / “Gatekeeper”), is the great wonderworking image of the Iveron Monastery on Mount Athos. It is a Hodegetria bearing a wound on the right cheek from which, in the tradition, blood once flowed.

The origin story is transmitted as a tradition of the iconoclast period: a pious widow of Nicaea, to save the icon from imperial soldiers, cast it into the sea, where it stood upright on the water; a soldier’s spear had struck the Virgin’s cheek and drawn blood. Generations later the icon is said to have appeared off Athos in a pillar of fire, and the Georgian monk St. Gabriel of Iveron walked upon the sea to bring it ashore. Repeatedly the monks set it in the monastery church, and repeatedly it returned of itself to the gate — whence its name — the Mother of God declaring (in the tradition) that she had come not to be guarded by them but to be their guardian. [Apocryphal: this narrative is a hagiographical tradition, not a documented event; it is preserved in the *Athonite Patericon* and later monastery accounts, and the surviving panel is generally dated by scholars to the eleventh–twelfth century, well after the iconoclast era to which the legend assigns its ordeal.] The Iveron icon has been among the most copied of all Marian images; celebrated copies were venerated at the Iveron Chapel by the Resurrection Gate in Moscow and, in more recent memory, in the weeping “Montreal Iveron” copy of the twentieth-century Athonite tradition.

The Tikhvin icon (Tikhvinskaya)

The Tikhvin Mother of God is a Hodegetria whose tradition, like the Iveron’s, links it to Constantinople before the City’s fall. By the Russian account it appeared in 1383 — borne miraculously through the air and seen hovering over Lake Ladoga and other sites near Tikhvin, north of Novgorod, where a church and later a great monastery were built to enshrine it; the tradition holds that the icon had departed Constantinople of its own accord (Russian hagiographical tradition; cf. the surveys in Shevzov). [Disputed: the Constantinopolitan-origin story is traditional; the panel itself is variously dated by art historians, and its identification with any Byzantine prototype is not established.]

The Tikhvin icon’s modern history is unusually well documented. During the Second World War it was removed from Russia amid the German occupation and eventually entrusted to Archbishop John (Garklavs), who carried it to the United States; it was kept for decades at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Chicago on the express condition that it be returned to a free Tikhvin monastery. That condition fulfilled, the icon was returned to the Tikhvin Monastery in Russia in 2004.

Others briefly noted

The tradition venerates many more wonderworking images than can be treated here:

Smolensk (Smolenskaya) — a Hodegetria so central that the “Hodegetria” type is often called by its name in Russia; associated with the defense of Smolensk and, in the tradition, with a Byzantine imperial provenance.
The Sign of Novgorod (Znamenie) — an Oranta/Platytera credited with delivering Novgorod during the siege of 1170, when (by the twelfth-century Novgorodian tradition) the icon turned its face to the city and wept as the besiegers’ arrows struck it.
The Kursk-Root icon (Znamenie / “of the Sign”) — by tradition found in 1295 at the root of a tree near Kursk; connected in later accounts with the childhood healing of St. Seraphim of Sarov, it was carried into exile after the Russian Revolution and is venerated by the Russian Church Abroad as the “Hodegetria (Directress) of the Russian Diaspora.”
The Sitka icon (Our Lady of Sitka) — venerated at St. Michael’s Cathedral in Sitka, Alaska, and associated with the Orthodox mission to America; it is the best-known wonderworking Marian icon of the New World.

In every case the discipline is the same: the miracle and apparition accounts are received as the testimony of the tradition and its named sources, held in honor, and reported as such — while the questions art history can answer (the date and place of a panel, the layers of later repainting) are kept distinct from the questions of faith. The two are not enemies. The Church venerates these icons not because it has proved their legends but because, through them, it has found itself brought again and again to the Mother of God and to her Son. The feasts on which many of them are commemorated are treated in the companion collection (see ../07-the-feasts-of-the-theotokos/the-protection-and-other-feasts.md).

References

Shevzov, Vera. Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004 (on the cult of Marian icons, the Kazan and Vladimir traditions, and popular veneration).
Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. 2nd ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1982 (types and the theology of the wonderworking image).
Pentcheva, Bissera V. Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006 (Byzantine background of the palladium icons).
Talbot Rice, David and Tamara. Icons and Their History. London: Thames & Hudson, 1974 (dating of the Vladimir panel and Byzantine Marian icons).
Bacci, Michele. Il pennello dell’Evangelista: Storia delle immagini sacre attribuite a san Luca. Pisa: GISEM–Edizioni ETS, 1998 (the medieval origin of the “painted by St. Luke” tradition).
The Second Council of Nicaea (787), Definition. NPNF II/14 (the veneration of icons and the passing of honor to the prototype).