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A piece of polished red rock lies at the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. This is the Stone of Unction or Rock of Anointing, so called because it was on this stone that Jose...
The Mount of Olives is the highest of three peaks rising to the east of the Old City of Jerusalem. Christ delivered his prophecies there and it was from the Mount of Olives that He entered Jerusalem ...
The valley of Jehoshaphat lies outside Jerusalem and is named after King Jehoshaphat of Judah (c. 873–c. 849 BC). The valley has been a Jewish burial ground for centuries and contains the tombs of Je...
Empress Helena (c. 244–327) was the mother of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, and did much to spread Christianity. In 325, she made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land with the specific aim of fi...
Described in the Books of Matthew and Mark, the beheading of St John the Baptist is commemorated by the Russian Church on 29 August/11 September. Orthodox Christians observe a strict fast and sing hy...
The subject of Our Lady of the Burning Bush is based on the Old Testament prophecy of the incarnation of Christ. Such theologians as St Gregory of Nyssa and Theodoret of Cyrrhus regarded Moses’s visi...
St George of Cappadocia was a soldier of high birth who was put to death at Nicomedia near Constantinople on 23 April 303. According to the apocryphal Acts of St George, he held the rank of tribune i...
The Congregation of the Blessed Virgin Mary is celebrated by the Orthodox Church on the day after Christmas (26 December/8 January). The iconography is based on the words of an Orthodox hymn sung dur...
This subject is taken from I Kings (17:1–6) and tells the story of how Elijah was fed in the wilderness by a raven sent by God. In the traditional iconography, the prophet sits on a stone with a staf...
Elijah (Hebrew: Yahweh is my God ) was a prophet in the Old Testament. When he was born, his father had a vision of handsome visitors greeting the infant, swaddled with fire and fed by the flames. Th...