Ben Williams
It’s not every day that a second-hand religious print becomes the center of an international mystery, but one $20 picture of Jesus and Mary is causing exactly that.
What started as an unremarkable bargain-bin find in Toronto, Canada, has now turned into a story that’s spreading faster than the resin it’s said to leak.
The print, a paper copy of a centuries-old Orthodox icon, was bought more than 15 years ago and now sits in a small Russian Orthodox church in Honolulu, Hawaii.
But lately, it’s been drawing global attention for a reason that has nothing to do with its price tag.
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At first, locals thought it was just another case of humidity wreaking havoc on cheap materials. Then, parish priest Father Nectarios Yangson noticed something that made him stop in his tracks.
He wrote in a letter to his parish: “During the last week of September, I began to notice an unbelievably strong smell of myrrh, at home, in my car, even at work. I couldn’t explain it,” he wrote in a letter to his parish. “We were afraid. We asked one another if we had recently cleaned or anointed the icons, and both of us said ‘no.’”
What he found next starts to border on the supernatural: a bead of fragrant oil forming on the left knee of the baby Jesus. The clear, sticky substance, which Father Nectarios and others identified as myrrh: the same resin mentioned in the Bible, began to seep from the image without any apparent source.
As reported by the New York Post, footage and photos later showed the liquid pooling beneath the frame and soaking into the cloth below.
The scent, described by witnesses as a powerful scent of roses, was so strong it even got the priest’s cat standing on its hind legs to investigate.
Isn’t it wild you can physically go and see an Orthodox icon stream miraculous myrrh with your own eyes and there’s STILL people who don’t believe in Christianity. pic.twitter.com/v8laTN3Wbd
— Ben Luigi (@RealBenLuigi) October 16, 2025
Since that moment, believers have been flocking to the Holy Theotokos of Iveron Russian Orthodox Church to witness what they’re calling a miracle.
They claim the substance has healed illnesses ranging from blindness and paralysis to chronic pain and even cancer, as originally stated in Nectarios’ letter.
The Russian Orthodox Church officially recognized the ‘Hawaiian Iveron Icon’ in 2008 as miraculous, granting Father Nectarios permission to bring it to churches around the world. He’s since taken the icon to over 100 locations across the US and Europe, where millions have venerated it.
Father Nectarios said: “Some days have been completely dry, while on other days they are covered in myrrh. Yet whether they stream or not, they continuously give off an extremely strong scent of roses.”
The priest added: “It is truly a great miracle! I sometimes wonder if it is a warning.”