☦
Andrei Rublev is a classic, incredible film loosely based on the life of the 15th-century Eastern Orthodox icon painter.
Death To The World (Archived Issues 1-11) (Alt) (Soulless reboot), a 90s-era zine created as an attempt by monks and nuns from the St Herman of Alaska Monastery to evangelize teens for Eastern Orthodox Christianity by co-opting punk aesthetics. At one time, there were about 50,000 copies circulating through punk shows and underground hangouts.
Early Chants of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church is the Orthodox album I play most often, usually while working on something possesing a relevant sort of spiritual significance.
The Orthodox Arts Journal covers visual arts, music, liturgical ceremony and texts, relevant art history, and theory to “highlight the unified witness of the arts to the beauty of the Kingdom of God and to promulgate an understanding of how the arts work together in the worship of the Church.” Of particular interest is their illustration project for Orthodox books.
The Agpeya, a web version of the Coptic Orthodox Book of Hours.
St. Pachomius Library, an encyclopedia of Orthodox Christianity established in 1994.
Orthodox Photos, collected with some contextual information as well.
Chernobyl icon resources gathering of most currently-online information pertaining to the unique designs.
Monks of dust. During a rarely granted artistic residency on Mt. Athos, Xavier Zimbardo discovered in an abandoned monastery hundreds of deteriorating photographs of Russian monks who were in residence there, prior to returning to their home country to fight against the Bolsheviks in 1917. He photographed a selection of these images on site, never moving them from where he found them. The result is a visually arresting collection of 75 intimate portraits that evoke the chasm between absence and presence, physicality and spirituality, sensuality and disintegration.
Podoben, English translations of Orthodox music.
Orthodox Christianity Directory, massive link collection seemingly now defunct for some reason.
Misty Orthodox. Can the reverence religion demands survive the cultural demands of the modern internet?
It's always a delight to locate the most striking physical locations an expansive religion has devoted to itself.
Trees – The Panagia Plataniotissa Church, shaped in the cavity of a roughly 1,000 year old platanus tree. Kutaisi Botanical Garden Chapel, within a still-living 400-year-old oak tree.
Trains – The Chapel of St. Olga was the first Orthodox church to travel the railways. Nizhniy Novgorod Traincar Church was born when the local community transformed an abandoned train carriage into the place of worship they were missing, maintaining their DIY chapel independently over the years all by themselves.
Stone – Church of St. George, hewn from a single block of volcanic rock in the shape of a Greek cross, purportedly in line with a vision the king who commisioned it experienced. Turkey's Cape Jason Church replaced an ancient temple of Jason devoted to protecting sailors from the Black Sea. It now sits, in total solitude, in an overgrown cornfield next to a lighthouse overlooking the roaring waves of the Pontus.
Macedonia – Mt. Athos (Still-active blog devoted to Mt. Athos), host of a monastic community that's “been the spirit of Macedonia for more than 1,000 years.” Monastery of the Most Holy Theotokos Eleusa is a humble Macedonian monastery, humbly introduced.
My grandfather has studied Eastern Orthodox history as a hobby for many years, his home's full of literature, and I intend to ask him questions about it when I get the chance.