Vestments and liturgical items

We have ecclesiastical vestments and other church items from the 19th and 20th centuries, ranging from the elaborate to the humble.

This simply but elegantly embroidered omophorion is from a complete set of episcopal vestments made for the ordination of Mstyslav (Skrypnyk) in Nazi-occupied Kyiv in 1942. He and the other hierarchs of the newly-reborn Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church fled to the West, settling in Western Europe, Canada, and the United States.

This humble set of cuffs (epimanikia) are also of historical significance. The set of priestly vestments to which they belong were pieced together in post-War Germany by an unknown but ingenious seamstress from whatever scraps of fabric that happened to be available in the DP camp.

This fragment of an ecclesiastical textile (likely a part of a stikharion) has seen better days. Its damaged condition came about when zealously anti-religious Communist activists broke into and vandalized the collections of the Poltava Museum in the 1930s.

This wood hand cross was carved in the Hutsul region of the Carpathian Mountains in 1898, and clearly shows signs of liturgical use.