In a world full of grief, icons are a testimony to the divine joy and the inexhaustibility of hope. Within a world wracked by fratricidal wars, icons portray the promise of love. They are a beacon of light in a world darkened by enslavement, a world constantly beset by epidemics, famines, plague, fires and floods . . . Whatever the age, the senselessness and ugliness that so often scars this world encounters a bulwark of resistance in the icon – I. Yazykova, Hidden and Triumphant.