Treasure in a Box

Treasure in a Box: A Guide to the Icons of St. Andrew is a narrative companion to the largest body of Pokrovsky icons in North America, located at St. Andrew Antiochian Orthodox Church in Lexington, Kentucky. The late Ksenia Mihailovna Pokrovskaya was a world-renowned master iconographer who immigrated to the United States from Moscow in 1991, six months before the collapse of the Soviet Union. During the 1960s, she gave up a promising career as a biophysicist at Moscow University to become a leader of a clandestine movement that revived the tradition of icon painting in her homeland, where it was forbidden by law. Over the past two decades the curious as well as the faithful have come to survey the interior of an unremarkable shoebox structure that is St. Andrew Orthodox Church. The universal response has been one of awe when standing before this visual gospel that portrays the history of salvation from the conception of the Virgin Mary to the evangelistic preaching of the apostles. Treasure in a Box: A Guide to the Icons of St. Andrew provides an up close look at these symbols of faith.