Antiochian Orthodox Icons

The Church of Antioch is one of the oldest in Christendom: it was in Antioch, according to the Book of Acts, that the disciples were first called Christians. Its Orthodox faithful, the Rum Orthodox of Syria, Lebanon and the wider Levant, have prayed before icons for as long as there have been icons, and the theology that defends them was shaped in their lands. St John of Damascus, a son of a Christian family in Umayyad Damascus who became a monk at Mar Saba near Jerusalem, wrote the classic defence of holy images in the eighth century. This collection follows the icon in the Antiochian world: ancient shrines such as the monastery of Our Lady of Saydnaya, medieval treasures like the double-sided icon of Kaftoun in north Lebanon, and the Arabic-speaking painters of Aleppo, Damascus and Jerusalem who, from the seventeenth century, created a distinct Arab Orthodox and Melkite school with long Arabic inscriptions and local saints. It also follows the Church of Antioch to North America, where St Raphael of Brooklyn shepherded Arabic-speaking Orthodox immigrants and the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America grew from his work.