Down a deeply rutted dirt road, far from Russia’s centers of power and wealth, sits a small compound behind twelve-foot-high brick walls. People in the nearest village, several miles away, have heard rumors that an odd man lives there, a monk perhaps. But no one has seen him or knows anything about him.
I ring a buzzer on an intercom, and a heavy door swings open. A neatly tended rose garden lies before me. Flagstone paths lead to two small, modern brick houses and a chapel, whose white stucco glistens in the summer sunlight. A simple iron Greek (rather than Russian) cross adorns its peak. I follow the path to the house on the right. A man in a black cassock opens the door and greets me. He is Fr. Zinon (his secular name is Vladimir Mikhailovich Teodor), said to be the country’s most gifted iconographer.
In the Soviet Union, icon painting was a forbidden art, a form of religious propaganda. The communist state overlooked small projects for the few churches that remained open, but not until the Gorbachev era could Fr. Zinon work openly. Today, he has retreated. Russia’s Orthodox hierarchs do not favor the understanding of the church that his icons communicate. But behind these tall compound walls, he continues to bear a quiet witness to an alternative way of church life.
