In our Inside Look stories, Herald-Leader journalists take you inside places around Lexington and Kentucky that you maybe haven’t seen before. Read more. Story idea? [email protected].
Thousands of drivers race down Man o’ War Boulevard every day, never noticing the small white building in a grove of trees between Grassy Creek and Clay’s Mill.
A passenger might notice the small white building is topped with a solitary onion dome, painted gold, like a tiny approximation of a Russian building plopped down in south Lexington. And if they were curious enough to get onto Higbee Mill and make it to St. Andrew Orthodox Church, they would find that small, square building opens into an extraordinary universe — a jewel box of glittering gold leaf and sumptuous colors — of religious worship brought to life through divine depictions of the life and death of Christ.
“The center of the church is seen as a meeting place between heaven and Earth, God and man, we have a part of heaven in our midst,” said Father Tom Gallaway who became St. Andrew’s priest in 1988. “It reveals to us the spiritual, invoking us into greater prayer and unity in our worship.”
In the simplest description, the Eastern Orthodox church is a major branch of Christianity that traces a direct line to the Apostles, a church riven with plenty of its internecine fights, but none that included a Reformation, a Pope, or many changes to the liturgy. The ancient tradition of painted icons is integral to the Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox or in the case of St. Andrew, Antiochian Orthodox.
So all Orthodox churches have icons. But not all of them have what St. Andrew displays: a pale blue ceiling above three walls of floor-to-ceiling icons by one of the most important painters of modern iconography, a woman who left a doctorate in biophysics to learn the craft of iconography in secret in the Soviet Union before fleeing to the United States: Ksenia Pokrovsky…