Orthodox church painted by Priest Theodore Jurewicz

Priest, iconographer and reverend Theodore Jurewicz has spent six years covering walls of St. Stephen Serbian Orthodox church in byzantine style religious paintings. Paintbrush and palette in hand, the Serbian Orthodox priest filled virtually every square inch of interior wall and ceiling with icons, sacred paintings depicting the life of Christ and the angels and saints. Saints are seen balancing gilded halos, winged angels hug curved arches, calligraphic lettering help to tell ancient stories. “I was always interested in holy pictures when I was a child. I used to scribble on paper and on the walls”, Jurewicz said. “It just grew on me, I guess“. St. Stephen Serbian Orthodox Church is located in Lackawanna, New York. St. Stephen Serbian Orthodox Church was completed just in time for the May 5 Easter celebration.

One of Jurewicz’s mentors, a monk named Father Cyprian Pyzhov, had done some work in the Lackawanna church in the 1960s. ‘We don’t worship icons, we honor them, we venerate them,’ Trbuhovich explained. ‘We use them to communicate with the person in the icon. It helps us to see them.’

Icons are not meant to look realistic, with portions painted out of scale or with symbolic flourishes. While the artists, mostly out of humility, don’t sign their work, it is often easily identifiable. ‘It’s not like Rembrandt. It’s other worldly,’ Father Leoniet Charlancow, a Rasifer monk at the Holy Trinity Monastery Icon Studio in central New York, said of the traditional style. ‘It’s supposed to transport you to another dimension, Heaven.’

From top to bottom, every space is seen covered in vivid colors thanks to the reverend’s careful paintbrush which depicts hundreds of figures in the timeless Byzantine style.

Orthodox church painted by Priest Theodore Jurewicz

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