The church celebrates St. Prince Vladimir’s Memorial Day on July 28. Serbian bishop Nikolaj (Velimirović) characterized the importance of the Holy Prince Vladimir for Russia as follows, “This… Russian celebration is a religious, national, state, and cultural holiday. For Prince Vladimir laid the cornerstone on which the nine-hundred-year-old chamber of the Russian faith, the Russian nation, the Russian state and Russian culture was erected. He is the spiritual ancestor of the Russian people.”
Even the name of the country called Rus in Russian is usually pronounced in Greek — Rossiya. If Vladimir had been baptized by Rome, surely now the name of the country would have been written in Latin — Russia, and if he had converted to Islam, it would be Al-Rusiya in Arabic manner. The word “icon” itself is also Greek, meaning “image”. These are just a couple of illustrative examples out of many possible ones.
The half-length image of St. Vladimir presented in the exhibition was most likely a church icon, and was probably part of the iconostasis. This is indicated by its relatively large size (66 centimeters in height), as well as by the upper edge of the icon board in the form of a semicircle.
The icon “The Holy Prince Vladimir
Equal-to-the-Apostles” is painted in a picturesque manner — with oil paints;
relief thick brush strokes are clearly discernible to the naked eye. Saint
Vladimir is depicted as a gray-haired, long-bearded old man with a thin,
elongated face. His eyes are turned up to the Sky. On his head is a princely
fur-trimmed hat. He is dressed in a red cloak (an attribute of royal dignity).
In his hands, at chest level, the holy prince holds a cross — the sign of his
mission equal to that of the apostles. The background and the halo were
originally covered with gold leaf, but later the icon was damaged: the
iconographic “gold” is mostly lost, and the poliment — brown base for gilding —
is exposed. The fields and the halo are decorated with embossing on gesso, on
top of which gold leaf is applied. The embossed ornaments are painted with
different colors, which adds expressive decorative elements to the image.
