To See and to Suffer

Bethancourt formed the church in 1996, when he and a small group of followers left Santa Fe’s Holy Faith Episcopal Church to connect with the more holistic and mystical roots of Christianity. They purchased a house on Cordova Road and worshipped in its living room while a Southwestern Byzantine–style temple arose on the garage’s former site.

Once allied with Catholicism, Orthodox churches began pulling away in AD 453 and made a final break in the Great Schism of 1054. Under names that include Eastern Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, and Greek Orthodox, its outposts today claim more than 230 million members concentrated in places like Greece, Turkey, Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and North Africa.

Holy Trinity belongs to the Antiochian Archdiocese of North America grounded in Acts 11:26, which details how Jesus’s disciples Barnabus and Paul spent a year teaching at a church in Syria’s Antioch and became the first of his followers to be called Christians. That lineage inspired Bethancourt’s vision to cover the temple’s white walls with traditional iconography. “It’s a joining of heaven and earth,” he says. “To see and to suffer the splendor of God is transformative and poetic.”

Finding the artists who could carry that out, however, required a few miracles.

FOR 40 YEARS, Russian native Dmitry Shkolnik has studied and practiced iconography, specializing in 15th-century styles. Based in San Francisco, he has led projects across the United States. When Bethancourt reached out to him, he came to visit the church. Its architecture intrigued him.

“A special characteristic of traditional Byzantine churches is no 90-degree angles,” Shkolnik says. “Everything is very soft lines, curved lines. In a way, Holy Trinity is quite an original architecture, very unusual.”

He dove into research on the congregation’s preferred 11th- and 12th-century iconography styles and returned some sketches to Bethancourt, who was sold. About 15 years ago, the initial two phases of work began, first on the sanctuary and then the cupola, with two Russian iconographers joining Shkolnik in painting on dry plaster.

Shkolnik’s more typical style would have employed bold colors, but the earlier iconographers used painstaking layers of nearly transparent paint.

“When you see the blue background,” he says of the images at Holy Trinity, “it isn’t blue. The first color is flesh or pinkish, but transparent, so the plaster is showing through. On top of that is dark gray, also transparent. And on top of that is blue. It’s giving you quite a deep tone of background, a vibrant tone. It’s very delicate work.”

To decorate the dome, the artists stood on scaffolding for long, craned-neck hours—even during weekday services, which fed the contemplative nature of their work. “An iconographer is not exactly an artist,” Shkolnik says. “You need to believe in what you’re doing.”

When the artists sketched an image of Mary onto the sanctuary wall, Bethancourt stepped in. It wasn’t the Mary he had seen during what Orthodox believers call a noetic vision. He prayed with the artist, and they agreed on a Mary welcoming the world that she is larger than, her arms held wide.

By 2012, those phases were complete, and the artists went home. But blank walls remained.

Bethancourt retired in 2021, and Father Jesse Robinson took over the church, now 100 members strong. When a private donor offered to fund the remaining iconography—most critically, the galaxy of ancient and modern saints who tell stories so complex that Bethancourt compares them to Zen koans—the project was reborn. Then Russia invaded Ukraine. Iconographer Alexander Chernyy fled to the nation of Georgia; Shkolnik’s other collaborator, Aleksei Vronskii, remained in Moscow. There could be no travel. Basic communication turned scarce.

Nevertheless, the artists ingeniously devised a new method of painting on canvases that could be glued to the walls. In 2023, Chernyy carried his canvases to the Georgia border, where wait times could exceed 100 hours, and handed them to Vronskii and Shkolnik.

“We call them our refugee icons,” Robinson says.

Shkolnik estimates that canvas iconography will cover the entire temple over the next two years; he hopes to come for another work session this spring. While Robinson considers the artwork a necessity for piercing the veil between heaven and earth, he knows the church has survived harsher times. During the Soviet era, churches were looted. KGB officers masqueraded as priests. Believers could be labeled dissidents and disappear into a gulag.

“There are stories of Romanian prisons, where one guy had memorized the gospels,” Robinson says. “They would huddle around a bed—Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant—and pray together. There was the sense of, ‘We’re not all the same, but we’re all locked in here together.’ That, I think, is just as or maybe more beautiful than all this.”

IVAN DIMITROV SHOULDN’T HAVE SURVIVED. Born in a Bulgarian wheat field 80 years ago, he endured the poverty and authoritarianism of the Soviet era. After refusing to join the government party, he was denied the education he craved. Still, his wood-carving skills pulled him away from manual labor and eventually got him to Paris, then London, and finally, Santa Fe.

His intricately detailed altars and thrones adorn churches throughout the United States, including inside the Santo Niño Chapel, in Chimayó, and the iconostasis of Holy Trinity. Pulsating with saints, angels, wheat, grapes, roses, and more, Dimitrov’s iconostasis—a fundamental feature of Orthodox churches—separates the sanctuary, where the Eucharist is celebrated, from the nave, where the congregation stands or, in some cases, sits. His work, which accompanied the iconographers’ first phases, interweaves the images so completely that it can take a guide to point out every detail.

In November 2020, his beloved wife, Vesselina, died. Dimitrov spent months in his garage’s workshop carving an Orthodox bishop’s throne that includes an image of her face on the back. “God was helping me to not fall down,” he says of the work, which he donated to the church. “This is the one place I can feel very free. You feel connected with something extraterrestrial.”

For Robinson, the changing play of light within the sanctuary deepens his fascination with the art. “Sometimes sunshine from the dome windows will fall on a saint’s face,” he says. “Sometimes our services are in near darkness, just candles. After a long service, you feel the saints are here with you.

“This is more than artistic adornment,” Robinson continues. “These are virtual depictions. On Sunday, when we celebrate the resurrection, we’re virtually participating in the event. We participate in Christ’s humanity. A church with nothing on its walls is missing something of the incarnation.”

Kate Nelson loves the art and architecture of New Mexico churches but finds herself closest to God while in nature.