STORY ABOUT A VENERABLE ICON

Outwardly just another story in the criminal column of a routine news release suddenly made headlines, offering evidence that Tykhomel, a small backwater village (about 200 households) by the quiet River Horyn, was once a large center of trade and crafts.

But first consider the criminal story. Late one night in January someone broke and entered the home of Olha Sysiuk, a 75-year-old ailing pensioner who had long stopped leaving home. The man grabbed the icon on the wall and vanished into the night. Detectives from the Bilohirya district militia later recalled that it took them two weeks to hunt down the criminal. A suspect was arrested in Yampil, a nearby village. The man was freshly out of prison after serving his fifth term. The icon was reportedly found in his attic. And the icon turned out to be priceless.

The old woman recalls that she was visited by three monks from Pskov “last fall, before harvest time.” They had traveled long before reaching the godforsaken village, and they had a catalogue. They studied the icon for a long time and photographed it from different angles. In the end the monks were overjoyed. They knelt in front of the icon and prayed impassioned and long. In their prayers, they announced that it was the Icon of the Madonna of Tykhoml, dating from ca. 1200. It was believed to have long been lost, yet here it was. “No, they did not ask me to sell it. They said the Madonna of Tykhoml is the patron saint of the village and that it must to be kept here,” she says.

People in the village claim the icon works miracles. “I became paralyzed and asked for the icon to be brought. I prayed before it and asked the Mother of God to deliver me from my affliction... Now I can walk, at least at home,” one old woman recalls. The local Orthodox community confirms her story. Other stories can be heard about the icon’s miracles. Old-timers say things like that happen with ancient long-revered icons.

Oleksandr Kucheriavy, head of the Bilohirya district militia, told The Day that arrangements are being made for an expert examination of the icon impounded as material evidence when searching the home of the 41-year-old suspect from Yampil. Whether the icon found in the attic is the one of the Madonna of Tykhoml stolen that January night remains to be ascertained. The village’s Orthodox believers claim that, while the Bilohirya detectives were searching for the criminal, he was seen on Andriyivsky uzviz in Kyiv, trying to establish the precious icon’s actual value. Allegedly, he was finally told it cost $40,000. He was noticed by militiamen and an inquiry was sent to Bilohirya district: had a valuable icon been stolen?

Oleksandr Kucheriavy did not deny the allegation, although neither the old woman, nor the village’s Orthodox community denied the Pskov monks’ story. After all, the monks had not made their trip without reason. The Tykhomel Orthodox faithful are delving into local history, trying to find out how, when, and why the old icon was lost.

As for modern history, old Olha Sysiuk knows it from her mother-in-law, God rest her soul. “It was when those atheists ruined the church in Tykhomel and made a bonfire of the holy vessels and other things of the church.”

That conflagration devoured the sacraments, icons, banners, and vandalized the iconostasis. As though in a wild medieval scene, witches and demons in human form danced around the fire, drunken with and driven by the official literacy campaign with its militant atheism. They fed the fire, tossing chandeliers and bronze candlesticks.

“My mother-in-law snatched the icon from the fire and ran away,” recalls Olha Sysiuk.

She goes on with her blood-curdling story of how those twentieth century godless vandals chased the poor faithful woman (she did at the time what would be described now as drawing the enemy’s fire on herself). She ran along the bank of the Horyn. “She saw they were catching up with her, so she tossed the icon in the river and ran on...” When she could run longer she fell, and they gave her a savage beating.

The old woman, weary with life and its trials, long prepared “to meet the Almighty,” believes that what happened to her mother-in-low afterward could not have happened otherwise. After the savage beating, one moonlit night she returned to the place where she had tossed the icon in the river and found it on the bottom. Nor did Olha doubt for a moment that the Icon of the Mother of God would be found after the criminal broke into her home and stole it.

The wind returneth again according to his circuits.

For years on end the Icon of the Madonna of Tykhoml was the sole great mystery jealously preserved by the toiling Sysiuks, passed from one generation to the next, until it came time for what was officially formulated as the “free expression of religious persuasions.” It was then the old woman put the icon in its proper place, in a special corner of the room called the pokuttia. She would pray there every morning and every evening. Now the family secret was public knowledge and faithful from neighboring villages came to revere the holy image. None would even imagine that anyone would dare steal it. People knelt and prayed to Her and Her Son, looking into the Virgin Mary’s large sad eyes that seemed to have absorbed all of this world’s age-old sufferings. They prayed with a faith that had survived decades of ruthless godlessness, with an ardent hope that they would be delivered from sin and guided to the one true path.

In place of the church is a large boulder, reminding one and all of what happened in 1939 when the house of God was razed to the ground. I went to the place with a friend of mine, an antiquarian. We walked silently to where a symbol of faith had been devoured by fire, as though hoping to see the phoenix. A narrow village street, never paved, was lined by old bent cabins serving as village homes. Not all of the chimneys were smoking under the cold February sky. “There are houses like abandoned cold bird nests,” Olha Sysiuk told us.

Tykhoml is mentioned in Old Rus’ chronicles as a city in the tenth century. What is left of it in the twentieth century is a small godforsaken village, with not a sign of civilization except electricity regularly cut off in keeping with the local energy economy schedule.

Here and there one can hear a pig or a cow, even a rooster and a mongrel. And there is a place historically known as the Tykhoml Fortress, dating from the sixteenth century. It is almost completely destroyed by time and no one seems to care, although the site should be protected by law as an architectural treasure. As we got there one look at the ruins was enough. That was a place where Christian craftsmen and merchants had built the church. When? None of the villagers know, although people remember that the Icon of the Mother of God of Tykhoml was carried into the temple on December 4. Every year the date has been marked by pilgrimage to Olha Sysiuk’s home. “Orthodox believers would come from everywhere,” recalls the old woman.

The place is very quiet. Perhaps because it looks deserted or because of sad memories, one’s imagination reaches high up to where soars the now content soul of an ordinary woman who had snatched the holy image from the satanic fire and run with it along the River Horyn... Her Orthodox soul has long been admitted into paradise, but perhaps it is allowed to leave and fly through the Pearly Gates on December 4 to visit Tykhomel, called Tykhoml when it became part of Kyiv Rus’ in 981.

Some time after this annexation Tykhoml would disown paganism and convert to Christianity. But when was the church built and the holy protective image installed? Who painted the icon, what school did he belong to?

Thus far, there are only more or less credible guesses. From the historical sources it is known that in the thirteenth century the River Horyn was navigable, ships laden with merchandise plying it as far the sea, just as goods were delivered over long distances by oxcarts. Where was the icon brought from on the great watery road from the Varangians to the Greeks? Perhaps there was an icon-painting school in Tykhoml, lost in the mist of the centuries? Olha Sysiuk recalls the traveling monks, “They said that there is another such icon only in Pochayiv” [the site of an old monastery — Ed.]

The material evidence contained in a criminal case and the investigation is kept secret, as provided by law; the suspect is held under arrest; and the investigation is in progress. Perhaps they will find the money for an expert examination. Before the case passes into the hand of Themis and the icon is finally returned to where it belongs, Tykhomel will be brought back from oblivion little by little, along with historical memory.

This memory will recall that Tykhoml was laid waste in the course of internecine feuds. In 1203, battling the Hungarian king, Prince Danylo Romanovych asked Prince Iziaslav Mstyslavovych for help. According to a chronicler, he “committed an act of treason, seized Tykhoml, and returned.”

This was followed by Tatar raids and an epidemic of cholera. Later chroniclers point out that the place fell into decay, but not to the extent it would suffer in the twentieth century.

This is history. What does the future? “Only God knows,” Olha Sysiuk is convinced Most of her thoughts are on the past more than the future — the distant past when she inherited the Icon of the Mother of God of Tykhoml and recent past when she was visited by the monks from Pskov. Perhaps they will hear about this minor criminal event and turn their attention from earthly matters, even if for a short while to save a sinful soul. And then evil will be found in the land of Tykhoml. What century, then, does the stolen icon belong to?