I make icons of the Serbian saints and sell them as framed pictures, art prints, stickers and printable files. Most people buy one for a krsna slava, the family feast day that every Serbian Orthodox household keeps for its own patron saint. The rest are gifts.
The name comes from the Holy Vine, the old image of the Serbian saints as branches of one living tree. It is painted on the fresco walls of the medieval monasteries.
I am Rade Kolbas. I was born in Gunja, in Croatia, close to the point where Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia meet. My mother’s side is Serbian, my father’s is Ruthenian, one of the small Slavic peoples of that region. In 1992 we fled the war and came to Germany. Today I live in St. Gallen in Switzerland, and I translate old Serbian folk tales into German and English.
The house I come from belonged to my Serbian grandparents. Their stories and the things they kept have stayed my connection to people I can no longer ask anything. Most of us will never learn the name of our great-great-grandfather. What survives is what a whole people held on to, and in that there is something of them.
That is the reason for these icons. The artwork is my own, made after the old models, because the icons you see in churches today are modern work and under copyright. The saints are lettered in Cyrillic. The banner carries the name of the feast day: Vidovdan, Đurđevdan, Nikoljdan, Petkovdan. Everything is printed to order and shipped worldwide through Etsy.
The mark of the house is the church of Ravanica, the monastery Prince Lazar built before he fell at Kosovo in 1389. An icon goes on the shelf where the kandilo, the small oil lamp, burns in front of it.
See the icons, or write to me at rade@crazyalchemist.com.