The Feast of the Kursk Root Icon of the Sign and its Hymnography

The Kursk Root Icon of the Sign (also known as Our Lady of Kursk) is an icon of the Theotokos of the Sign, apparently painted in the thirteenth century and discovered in a forest near Kursk around 1300 CE. The icon was taken abroad by Russian emigrants and since then it has become one of the main icons of the Russian Church Abroad. Normally, to commemorate this icon, the service for the icon ‘Sign’ found in Novgorod was used, but in 1951 a service devoted to the Kursk icon was created. This paper analyses the new service to the icon in light of the medieval tradition of services devoted to the Russian icons of the Theotokos and especially to the icon ‘Sign’.