Gorbanevka Icon of the Mother of God
The Gorbanevskaya Icon of our Most Holy Lady the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary
Kept 30 June — The finding of the icon in the meadow at Gorbanevka near Poltava
The Gorbanevka (Gorbanevskaya) icon is the chief wonderworking image of the Poltava country. It is reckoned a copy of the Korsun icon — the image which the tradition ascribes to the Evangelist Luke and which Vladimir the Great is said to have brought from Cherson to Kiev in 988 — and it takes its name from a Cossack called Gorban, who settled in the first half of the eighteenth century on the land that became the village of Gorbanevka, a few versts from Poltava. Mowing the grass in his apiary, his scythe struck something and broke; stooping, he found an icon of the Mother of God lying in the grass, and saw that the blade had cut the face beneath the right eye, and that a tear stood in the wound. He reported the finding to the church authorities, and a wooden church of the Mother of God was raised on the spot, replaced by a stone one in 1818. The icon — painted, unusually, on a sheet of iron and covered with a silver-gilt riza set with stones — drew pilgrims from the whole of Left-Bank Ukraine. It is commemorated on June 30 and is now kept in the cathedral of St Makarius at Poltava, where an akathist is sung before it every Friday evening.
The Cossack and the meadow
Gorbanevka lies just north of Poltava, in the country that the Cossack settlement of the Hetmanate filled in the decades after the wars of the seventeenth century. The village is named for its founder, a Cossack named Gorban, and the finding of the icon belongs to the same generation as the founding — the first half of the eighteenth century, which is as close as the sources come to a date.
The account, as the Poltava tradition transmits it, is short. Gorban was cutting the grass in his apiary; the scythe struck and broke; he bent down to see what he had hit, and found an icon of the Mother of God lying in the swathe. The point of the blade had wounded the painted face under the right eye, and from the wound a tear ran down. He did not keep the find, but declared it to the spiritual authority, and the icon was taken as a manifest sign.
The churches at Gorbanevka
A wooden church in honour of the Mother of God was built on the place where the icon was found; a stone church replaced it in 1818. Around the two churches grew the veneration that made Gorbanevka a place of pilgrimage for the Poltava, Kharkov and Chernigov provinces — the icon carried in procession into Poltava itself in years of drought and cholera, and returned to the village for its feast. The wound beneath the right eye remained visible on the face and was itself an object of veneration, as such marks are in the Slavic tradition, where a scar left by violence or accident becomes the image's proof rather than its blemish.
The icon at Poltava
The panel — properly a plate, for it is painted on iron rather than on wood or canvas — was in time given a silver-gilt riza set with precious stones, the gift of the Poltava gentry and of the merchants of the town, and in that state it is described in the nineteenth-century diocesan accounts. It is today kept in the cathedral of St Makarius in Poltava, and an akathist is sung before it there every Friday evening — a Friday devotion of the same kind as the Kasperov icon's at Odessa, and evidently borrowed from the same south-Ukrainian usage.
What is not known
Neither the date of the finding nor the age of the icon is transmitted. Its description as a copy of the Korsun image is a judgement of type, not a documented pedigree: the Korsun icons are a large and loosely defined family, and what is meant is that the Gorbanevskaya belongs to the half-length Hodegetria manner in which the Korsun type was reproduced in the Ukrainian lands. Some retellings enlarge the finding-story — the mower blinded and then healed, the tear gathered and applied to the eyes — but the older Poltava accounts do not carry those details and they are not asserted here. Nothing whatever is recorded of Gorban himself beyond his name and his bees.
Feast and commemoration
June 30 (church date; New Calendar civil June 30; Old Calendar civil July 13). The commemoration is Ukrainian and, through the Russian calendars that absorbed the Poltava usage, Russian; it is not in the Greek or Antiochian books, and the Orthodox Church in America does not carry it. Ukraine and Russia keep the Old Calendar for the fixed feasts, so the civil day for the icon's own people is July 13.
The day is that of the Synaxis of the Twelve Apostles, and the icon is honoured in the shadow of the apostolic office except at Poltava and Gorbanevka, where it is the patronal festival with a pilgrimage. It shares the day with the Balykino icon of the Starodub country — a second Ukrainian image on the same date, unrelated to this one.
A second, local Poltava commemoration on October 12 is reported in the Russian calendars. Whether that date is given in the Julian or the civil style could not be settled from the sources consulted, and it is therefore stated here in prose and not entered as a feasts: block; the point is referred to the coordinator.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
To the Theotokos let us now run in haste, we sinners and lowly ones, and let us fall down in repentance, crying from the depth of our soul: O Lady, help us, having compassion upon us; make haste, for we perish from the multitude of our transgressions; turn not thy servants away empty, for thee alone have we as our hope.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Kontakion — Tone 6
Protection of Christians that cannot be put to shame, mediation unto the Creator unfailing: despise not the suppliant voices of sinners, but be quick to help us who cry to thee in faith; hasten to intercession and make speed to entreaty, O Theotokos, who dost ever protect them that honour thee.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Appointed readings
Epistle — Philippians 2:5–11
5Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: 6Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: 7But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: 8And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. 9Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: 10That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; 11And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Gospel — Luke 10:38–42; 11:27–28
38Now it came to pass, as they went, that he entered into a certain village: and a certain woman named Martha received him into her house. 39And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus’ feet, and heard his word. 40But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me. 41And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: 42But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her. 27And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked. 28But he said, Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.
Iconography
The Gorbanevskaya is a Hodegetria of the Korsun manner: the Mother of God half-length, the Child on her left arm, her right hand raised toward him in the gesture of showing, the two faces close together and inclined — the intimate variety of the type in which the Korsun images are painted. It is dark, small, and in its present state almost wholly covered by a silver-gilt riza set with stones, so that only the faces and hands are visible. Its one distinguishing feature is the scar beneath the right eye of the Mother of God, the mark of the scythe, which the riza is cut to leave open.
The support is the second peculiarity: the image is painted on a sheet of iron, not on wood or canvas. Metal supports are uncommon in the Orthodox East and belong to the same Polish-Ukrainian workshop practice of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that gave the Hetmanate its oil-painted panels; the Gorbanevskaya is thus a local and late image venerated as an ancient one, which is the ordinary condition of the wonderworking icons of that country.
No pre-1900 image of this icon has been located and none is stored here. A search of Wikimedia Commons under the Russian and the Ukrainian forms of the name returned nothing at all. Such photographs of the icon as circulate are modern devotional shots published by the Poltava eparchy, whose copyright is the photographer's and which no third party's upload can release; the whose-licence test therefore excludes them, and the entry carries a the list of icons still being sought line instead.