Our Lady of the Wall: The Holy Land Icon Tradition from Origins to the Future

Wednesday 25th July - 4.30 to 6.30 pm
Marie Eugenie Room, Centre for Eastern Christianity, Heythrop College, University of London - Kensington Square, London W8 5HN


Ian Knowles, Founder-Director of the Bethlehem Icon School

After 25 years as an iconographer in the UK (Elias Icons), Ian’s work took a new turn in 2008 when he restored the damaged wall paintings in the Orthodox Church of St Nicholas’ Cave at Beit Jala. This led to commissions for icons at the Shrine of Our Lady of the Mount, at Anjara in Jordan, a new sanctuary design for the Sacred Heart Church at Naur near Amman, and saving the wall paintings at Bethlehem University Chapel. His most extraordinary commission is The Virgin Mother of the Church icon, written at the behest of local Arab Christians on the Palestinian side of the Israeli separation wall. Better known as Our Lady of the Wall, it places the Sacred amid the graffiti alongside the people’s suffering, but in contrast to violence and injustice, in the hope of peace and reconciliation for all. Ian will tell this remarkable story.

He will also bring news of the Bethlehem Icon School. Newly founded under the aegis of the Melkite Patriarchal Vicar, Archbishop Joseph Zerey in Jerusalem, with the support of Tantur Ecumenical Institute, it will ensure that the indigenous Arab Christian icon tradition, now hanging on by a thread, is preserved in a new generation.

The talk will be followed by Reception to mark the Opening of the Bethlehem Icon School – a £10 donation is suggested for the Bethlehem Icon School to “Friends of the Holy Land”

All are welcome. RSVP appreciated to johnchrysostom@btinternet.com