Canadian-made quality copy, wood mounted. 

Also known as "Icon of The Mother of God of Iveron"

Traditional history

According to the Orthodox Church's sacred tradition, the icon was at one time in the possession of a widow in Nicaea. Not wanting the icon to be seized and destroyed by the iconoclasts, she spent all night in prayer and then cast the icon into the Mediterranean Sea. The widow's son later went to Mount Athos, where he became a monk and recounted the miracle of the bleeding wound, and how the icon had been placed in the sea. Much later the icon was recovered from the sea by a Georgian monk named Gabriel who was laboring at the Iveron Monastery on Mount Athos. The icon was taken to the main church of the monastery from which the icon gets its name.

The tradition goes on to say that the following day, when the monks entered the church they could not find the icon. After searching they discovered the icon hanging on the gates of the monastery. This occurrence was repeated several times, until St. Gabriel reported that he had seen a vision of Mary, wherein she revealed that she did not want her icon to be guarded by the monks, but rather she intended to be their Protectress. After this, the icon was permanently installed above the monastery gates, where it remains to this day. Because of this, the icon came to be called "Portraitissa" or "Gate-Keeper". This title was not new for the Virgin Mary, but comes from a verse of the Hymn to the Mother of God: "Rejoice, O Blessed Gate-Keeper who opens the gates of Paradise to the righteous." Orthodox monks and nuns throughout the world will often place an icon of Mary Gate-Keeper on the monastery gates.

Moscow version

In 1648, in the Nikolo-Pervervinsky Monastery, Patriarch Nikon of Moscow, commissioned an exact copy of the Iviron icon to be made and sent to Russia. Almost immediately upon its arrival, the icon was "glorified" with numerous miracles attributed to it by the faithful. The Iverskaya Chapel was built in 1669 to enshrine the icon next to the Kremlin walls in Moscow. The chapel was the main entrance to Red Squareand traditionally everyone, from the Tsar down to the lowest peasant would stop there to venerate the icon before entering the square. After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the chapel was destroyed by the Communists and the fate of the icon is unknown to this day.

Montreal version

As is common in the Orthodox Church, the icon is a prototype which has been copied numerous times. Several of the copies themselves have been known to be wonderworking, one of the most famous of which is the myrrh-streaming icon from Montréal in Canada. For fifteen years (1982–1997), as myrrh continued to flow from the Icon, Brother Muñoz Cortés devoted himself to its care, accompanying it on numerous trips to parishes all over the United States and Canada, to South America, Australia, and Europe. The icon was stolen on one such trip, in October 1997, when Brother Muñoz Cortés was tortured and murdered in a hotel room in Athens, Greece; the icon has not been seen since. He had planned to return to Montreal the following day to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the appearance of the miraculous myrrh on the icon. A new copy of the Montreal Myrrh-Streaming Iveron Icon began streaming Myrrh at the Russian Orthodox Church in Hawaii in 2007.

Usually in stock