Saint Nicholas Church Icons Collections

Item Set

Title
Saint Nicholas Church Icons Collections
Description
These collections document the unique series of icons held in the Church of Saint Nicholas in Beit Jala (near Bethlehem). The church is built over the far older Chapel of Saint George which stands as the only remaining section of a monastery built around a network of caves where Saint Nicholas is said to have lived in the 3rd century CE. Numerous legends and miracles are attributed to Saint Nicholas in Beit Jala today. Many of the icons depict these miraculous events.

There are over 150 icons in the church, including the iconostasis and portable icons, mostly dating from the 1870s to the 1920s, with a small handful that could be considered an earlier primitive style from the Chapel of St George. The collections also contain a handful of contemporary icons.

The majority of the icons in the collection are in the indigenous Jerusalem School style, an indigenous Palestinian movement from the 19th and early 20th century. This style is almost completely neglected in global museum collections, which tend to focus on Byzantine, Russian or – more rarely – Balkan styles.

The Church of Saint Nicholas was built and funded in 1925 by the local community of Beit-Jala, not the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem. It has a unique legal status that sits outside of Waqf endowments, making the icons an interesting case study for the articulation of Arab identity within transnational Orthodox politics.

The collections are divided into five sub-collections according to their location within the church.

Funding for this collection was generously provided by the Council For British Research in the Levant (CBRL). The research and photography was carried out by Faten Nastas Mitwasi, Jabra Mitwasi and Sary Zananiri.
Subject
Beit Jala
Bethlehem
Palestine
Palestinian Diaspora

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