A hidden icon of St. Onuphrius turns up atop an old altar in Ukraine

Up the ladder

The researchers had come to the monastery at Pohonia (the Pohin monastery, also written Pogin), in western Ukraine, to describe its old altars for a book. The abbot, Fr. Terentiy, told them about a miraculous icon of St. Onuphrius in the old church.

Nadiia Babiy, an art historian and professor at Carpathian National University, was not sure the image in front of her was the one the story meant. At the very top of the altar was a cartouche with an inscription about prayer to the icon. “We took a ladder, climbed up and saw that the cartouche was held on by little wires,” she told Ukraine’s national news agency, Ukrinform. “We took it down, and under it we found the icon ‘The Taking Up into Heaven (Ascension) of St. Onuphrius,’ which no one had known about until now. We uncovered it right there in front of the church’s priests.”

The photograph Babiy supplied shows a curved panel, worn and cracked, painted with a burst of golden light. In the middle stands the saint, a thin, white-bearded hermit, borne up by two angels. Below runs a painted inscription in which the name of Paphnutius, the monk who in the old story found Onuphrius in the desert, can be made out.

“The old monastery in Pohonia also bore the name of St. Onuphrius.”

Nadiia Babiy · translated from the Ukrainian

A whole altar for one saint

According to Babiy, the altar dates from the late eighteenth century and was built in three tiers, each telling part of Onuphrius’s story. The lowest held “The Communion of St. Onuphrius,” showing him kneeling before a cup of patience and a crown of thorns, signs, she said, that he had given up earthly goods. An icon of St. Nicholas hangs there now. The Communion icon itself has not been found. The researchers identified it from the records of old church visitations. Above it was “The Death and Burial of St. Onuphrius,” and at the top, the newly found Ascension.

Babiy said Onuphrius is a symbol of the monastic life and often appears in the icons of Basilian monasteries. “The old monastery in Pohonia also bore the name of St. Onuphrius,” she added.

The monastery of the Dormition of the Mother of God at Pohonia, in the Ivano-Frankivsk region, is an active Greek-Catholic monastery for men, belonging to the Order of St. Basil the Great. It keeps a miraculous icon of the Mother of God, which Pope John Paul II blessed on June 27, 2001, during his apostolic visit to Ukraine.

The find came during about a year of work on the book, titled Pohonia, by O. Yehreshii, M. Vuianko, A. Hresko, N. Babiy and V. Tverdokhlib. Babiy said it reconstructs the monastery’s altars and its libraries, which held sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books printed in Venice, Florence, Milan and other cities of Europe.

Read it for yourself

Onuphrius chose a hidden life, and his icon stayed hidden for a long time. Jesus said, “For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad” (Luke 8:17). Open VRSZ, tap Luke 8:17, and read what early Christian writers said about the light that cannot stay covered.