“They were stoned to
death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in
skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented—of whom the world
was not worthy.” Hebrews 11:37-38
They stared
out from the frescoes on the walls that faced toward the large baptismal font,
their eyes determined, confident, serene. The bodies of the saints, wrapped in
the vestments of archbishops and abbots, were static and grand, timeless like
the figures in most Orthodox ikons. But
there was something unusual in their faces—an unexpected wrinkle here, a drooping
eyelid there. Was that the mark of a
scar?
I asked the
guide about them. They were, in fact,
portraits, he said. Father Cyprian, the
master iconographer, had known these men.
He’d done the faces himself. The
saints were leaders of his own time.
Some had been his friends.
Perhaps he’d served alongside some of them at the Divine Liturgy, or
they’d sat in the shade to share a glass together on a summer’s afternoon, back
before the awful civil war and the ransacking of the monasteries, back when
mother Russia was a land of monks and holy men.
They were
the modern martyrs, the guide said, they’d given their lives for the Gospel in
that bloodiest of centuries, the twentieth.
The Communists had sent them to glory with the machine gun and the hand-grenade. Father Cyprian had escaped, and along with
the scattered remnants of several other religious houses, he’d helped to found
this monastery, Holy Trinity, in the wilds of central New York State.
