Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch, was found hanged in his Sunningdale home in March 2013. Born to Ashkenazi Jewish parents, Berezovsky converted to Russian Orthodoxy in 1994. His leap of faith, I suspected, was more political than spiritual. ‘So why,’ I asked him at dinner one evening, ‘do you buy Russian Icons?’
Berezovsky told me that he tried to bribe Vladimir Putin with motor cars, but he refused them. He was more successful with gifts of Russian Icons, which Putin passed on to churches and monasteries. Throughout his political career, the Russian president has taken care to look after the Russian Orthodox Church. Does this reflect a genuine religious belief? His mother was a devout Christian who had her son secretly baptised. He is supposed to always wear a cross and make the sign of it in church.
Nevertheless, scepticism about the former KGB officer’s religiosity abound. An interviewer once asked Putin if he believed in a ‘supreme God’. He stonewalled, claiming that there ‘are things I believe, which should not in my position be shared’. Yet no priest is more certain that Putin’s faith is genuine than Kirill, the Russian church’s current patriarch, who has described him as a ‘miracle of God’.
Even discounting his mother’s influence, Putin is conscious of how deeply orthodoxy is embedded in Russian culture. When I first visited Russia in the Soviet era, I was astonished that its churches were still packed, even after half a century of communism. After the Soviet Union fell from power, as Lucy Ash suggests in her book The Baton and the Cross, the Russian Orthodox Church ‘took the place of the Communist Party’ and provided the ideological framework for Putinism. With the collapse of communism, identification as orthodox doubled in Russia to 71 per cent.
Whatever Putin’s motives, he has undoubtedly been a major influence on the revival of orthodoxy in Russia. It is a source of support that he continually mines. In 2017, I zigzagged across Russia with fellow icon enthusiasts. Following the oil price’s collapse two years before, all building work seemed to have halted. The only exceptions were Russia’s orthodox churches and monasteries. Over the last 35 years, the number of monasteries has bloomed from 18 to 788.
This was particularly evident on the Solovkii Islands in the White Sea. There the monastery founded by Zossima and Savvaty in the 15th century was being lavishly restored. Having been closed by Lenin in 1921, it was repurposed two years later as the Solovkii Concentration Camp of Special Designation. It was, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn described it, the ‘mother of the GULAG’. Now, thanks to government rebuilding, it is home to more than 40 monks.
Somewhat incongruously, given its Soviet past, Solovkii’s monastery was showing an exhibition of icons revering the Russian Orthodox Church’s newest saints: the murdered Tsar Nicholas II and his family. On the site of their bloody execution in the Ural city of Yekaterinburg sits the altar of the new Church of Blood. Completed by the Russian government in 2003, Putin took Gerhard Schröder, the then German Chancellor, for a visit the same year.
Demand for icons, ‘windows to heaven’ and an essential component of orthodox veneration, has grown in lockstep with congregants. Icons sold to western buyers during Soviet times started to find their way back to Russia in the first decade of the 21st Century. One Russian oligarch would bring monks and nuns on his private plane from Yekaterinburg to buy icons and reliquaries at the Temple Gallery in London for the benefit of a monastery that he was rebuilding there.
Yet the revival of orthodoxy is not a trend limited to Russia. Oriental (or Coptic) Orthodoxy, which split from Byzantine Orthodoxy after the ecumenical council of Chalcedon in 451 AD, has seen similar impressive growth. On a tour that I made of Egypt’s desert Coptic monasteries in 2018, new building work and restoration, financed mainly by American Copts, was very evident.
The Egyptian government and its armed forces also financed Cairo’s vast Cathedral of the Nativity. It was opened by Muslim President Abdul Fattah El-Sisi in 2019. Since 1980, the ranks of Egypt’s Coptic monks have swelled by 300 per cent. The associated Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, which traces its roots back to 330 AD when King Ezana made Christianity the state religion, has grown rapidly from 15 million to 50 million followers over the last 75 years.
Evidence of renewal is abundant at St. Catherine’s, a Byzantine monastery founded by Emperor Justinian in 548 AD that sits at the foot of Mount Sinai. On my visit there, the librarian-monk, Father Justin Sinaites, spent a morning showing samples of an estimated 10,000 illuminated books and manuscripts in its library. The Getty Foundation has paid for its housing in a state of the art library and is financing digital records to make them available online.
Orthodoxy is similarly showing signs of a revival in Greece. When I visited the semi-autonomous monastic state of Mount Athos in the 1970s, it was at its nadir with just 1,100 monks. Today, there are over 2,000. In England, interest in orthodoxy was enhanced by Charles III’s patronage and frequent visits to Vatopedi Monastery on Mt. Athos. The King is known to have collected icons for his garden chapel at Highgrove. In 2009, he founded the three-year icon painting course at The King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts in Chiswick.
There are also signs of an orthodox revival in America. Perhaps as an answer to Jordan Peterson’s ‘lost young men’ crisis, my recent experience at orthodox churches in Trenton, New Jersey and Virginia Beach suggests that young men are joining the orthodox churches in droves.
Incongruously, hemmed in by a car tyre replacement depot, a McDonald’s and a shopping mall, Virginia Beach’s Greek orthodox church, looks as though it were made of Lego. However, it makes up for its lacklustre appearance with a packed audience of all ages. The atmosphere was warm and fully engaged. Although Greek emigres were plentiful, catechumens (orthodox applicants) were ethnically diverse, including Asians and a young black F-18 Hornet navigator. Some members of the Virginia Beach congregation, who support the work of American icon painters, have even built a mobile Icon museum which they plan to drive to the numerous Orthodox conferences held around America.
Cultural venues also seem to be energising the orthodox bandwagon. Vicenza is home to a superb collection of icons owned by the banking group Intesa Sanpaolo. The Ikonen Museum in Recklinghausen has awakened from its former moribund state. In Massachusetts, the noted Dutch icon expert, Simon Morsink, has injected new life into the Museum of Russian Icons. Even more exciting is the likely opening soon of Belgium billionaire Erik Wittouk’s private collection, arguably the best in Europe, in Brussels. And last year I visited the remarkable new icon museum of the Georgian Orthodox Church in Svaneti, the province buried deep in the heart of the Great Caucasus Mountains. By contrast, the British Museum still hides much of the British Icon Collection from public view.
Perhaps sensing the growing interest in orthodox religion, the Louvre, already home to a fine collection of Coptic works, has recently announced that a new department of Byzantine and Eastern Christian Art will be opened in 2027. This will be the Louvre’s 9th department and its first new department since 2003.
Whether Putin will ever make a visit relies on far more than just the opacity of his own faith. Nevertheless, the development of the Louvre’s new space will likely trigger a further explosion of interest in orthodoxy in its many guises.
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