Sister Eliseea shares Bradetu with only a handful of other villagers. To date, the country is home to approximately 18,300 Orthodox churches. And for the past 15 years, these faithful have built churches at a rate of one church every other day. Nearly 90 percent of Romania’s 18.8 million people belong to the Orthodox Church. More generally, Sister Eliseea’s icons and their popularity reflect the revival of the Orthodox Church of Romania since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The density of her icons is similar to contemporary Russian icons, while the overlapping of cold over warm colors shows her subtle refinement.” Characters’ faces are reminiscent of the icons in Ohrid - the 11th century - and her style equates with secular art. Byzantine paintings are her starting point, but not her reference. “It is hard to be framed stylistically and it is not in continuity with the iconographic trends. Alin Razvan Trifa, professor of sacred art at the Babe-Bolyai University’s Faculty of Orthodox Theology in Cluj-Napoca. “What she is doing is different from what we generally see in Romania,” explains Dr. From her studio in Romania, she crafts the icons for parishes and collectors - Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant - from as far away as France and the United States. Sister Eliseea’s iconography has caught the attention of experts and enthusiasts around the world as much for its exquisite detail as for its unique style. On the left, Jesus cradles an infant, wrapped in a light blue cloth his disciples stand behind him while, on the right, a group of mothers and their children have gathered. The icon, she says, depicts the “Blessing of the Children” from the Gospel of St. It shimmers in the light, as would a precious jewel.įor months she worked on the piece, yet the soft-spoken nun explains its meaning as if were made not by her but by some other iconographer. Sister Eliseea holds it up to a window to illuminate its vibrant colors and fine details. She stands, walks away and returns a moment later with a recently completed icon, roughly the size of an index card. With a surgeon’s precision, she then runs the paint-soaked bristles along the black lines of her sketch.Īs the sun begins to set, Sister Eliseea takes a break. The paint, she says, rots quickly when wet but lasts a hundred years in an icon. With her mouth, she wets the bristles of a small brush, gently twists them into a sharp point and dips it into white paint made from organic materials that she has poured into a plastic bottle cap. The nun sits at the table, hunched over a small icon of the Virgin and Child she just sketched in black.

An assortment of paint jars, brushes and books clutters the surface. A worktable runs along the opposite wall under the window. Two armchairs are situated in front of a coffee table and television set. On this afternoon in August, the sun’s rays shine through a large window, filling the living room and studio. Sister Eliseea lives and works in a simple house in the rural village of Bradetu, nestled in the heavily wooded southern foothills of the Fagaras Mountains (part of the southern Carpathian Mountains) in central Romania, 150 miles northwest of Bucharest. Her dark hair is pulled back in a single, thick braid. The thin 42-year-old woman wears a long black skirt and matching sweatshirt. “For the liturgy is the intervention of God through man, and in making an icon, one should transmit to people what God wants.” “Writing an icon is liturgy,” says Sister Eliseea Papacioc, a Romanian Orthodox nun and world-renowned iconographer. Sister Eliseea sets aside an unfinished icon of the Holy Trinity to begin another one.

Iconographer abbess olympia