Icon Museum Recklinghausen, Orthodox art museum in Recklinghausen, Germany.
The Icon Museum Recklinghausen occupies the Turmschule, a former boys' school built in 1795/1798 opposite the Propsteikirche St. Peter on Kirchplatz. Its collection of over 3,500 icons, embroideries, miniatures and wood- and metalwork is the largest outside the Orthodox world, with pieces from Russia, Greece, Ethiopia and the Balkans, plus a Coptic collection covering Egypt from the 1st century to the early Middle Ages.
The museum opened in 1956 within a former school building dating from 1795, following a successful 1955 exhibition of icons from private collections. This move established one of the largest repositories of Orthodox religious art in Western Europe.
The museum's name comes from the Greek eikon, meaning image. Since 1958 the friends' association EIKON e.V. has organised lectures and exhibitions and brought together people interested in icon art. The collection spans Russia, Greece, Ethiopia and the Balkans, including 19th-century Romanian icons and a Coptic section covering Egypt from the 1st century to the early Middle Ages.
The museum occupies the Turmschule, a former boys' school built in 1795/1798, directly opposite the Propsteikirche St. Peter on Kirchplatz. It has been a listed building since 1983 and reopened in June 2012 after eighteen months of renovation. The entrance is wheelchair accessible.
The building, the Turmschule, was built in 1795/1798 on the site of a timber-framed house and served as a boys' elementary school until 1895. From 1927 to 1935 it housed the regional Vestisches Museum, and until 1945 the NSDAP had its quarters there; the publisher Aurel Bongers moved in shortly after the war.
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