A Sacred Friendship: How Byzantine Art — and Alexei Lidov — Changed My Life
(ESSAY) When I began exploring the history of Christianity and the art and architecture it inspired, I had no idea it would lead me to one of the closest friendships of my life. That friend was Alexei Mihailovich Lidov, a world-renowned scholar of Byzantine art, architecture and art history.
The path to that friendship began in the spring of 1999, when our family traveled to Turkey — Gallipoli, Ephesus and Istanbul — for the first time. The goal was to begin to understand one of the places where Christianity had first flourished in the first century. Though conquered by the Ottomans in 1453 and now largely Muslim, Turkey still holds deep Christian roots.
We had previously sponsored conferences for Christians living in countries under Sharia Law, which Turkey is not, but I realized I had only a vague understanding of the histories of both Christianity and Islam. So I began reading. One of the first books I picked up was “The Formation of Christendom” by Judith Herrin, then head of Byzantine Studies at King’s College, University of London. The book was eye-opening.
READ: An Interview With Alexei Lidov
After a five-week return visit to Turkey in 2001, I contacted Judith to ask if she’d meet me for lunch. I had questions. Amazingly, she said yes — and that began a long friendship.
In 2008, while we were in London on our way to our first five-week visit to Russia, I had lunch with Judith again. She insisted we meet her friend Alexei Lidov. She had met him when both were in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1994-95. I rarely follow through on introductions, but something told me to make the effort. A few weeks later, our family and two friends sat down for dinner with Alexei at the National Hotel in Moscow — and a friendship was born.
Alexei died in the intensive care unit of Botkin Hospital in Moscow on May 29, Ascension Day in the Russian Orthodox calendar and the anniversary of the 1453 fall of Constantinople to Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II. That same day, the church Alexei most loved — Hagia Sophia — was turned from a church into a mosque.
His funeral was held on June 1 at the Church of St. Nicholas in Tolmachi, a museum church that is part of the Tretyakov Gallery. The museum houses some of the most important icons ever created — works Alexei devoted his life to understanding and cherishing. He is buried in Moscow’s Sheremetskovye Cemetery.
That night in 2008 at the National Hotel was the first time I heard about many things. But what most transformed my understanding of Christian art and architecture was the concept of hierotopy, a term Alexei coined in 2001 during a residency at the Getty Center in Malibu, Calif.
Hierotopy — a new way to see the buildings I had come to love — describes the creation of sacred space as an art form in itself. He told us it was something he had been trying to articulate for some time, and during his time at the Getty, it finally crystallized.
In September 2018, Lidov joined a group that traced the Camino de Compostela from Toulouse, France. In Santiago, Roberta Ahmanson joined Lidov on the cathedral’s roof.
Creation of sacred spaces as an art form
Alexei explained that in the West, with the Enlightenment, art and architecture became separated from the observer. Humans were no longer immersed in sacred space as the early churches intended, but had become critics and spectators instead of participants. This was all new to me. The more I read and traveled, the more I saw he was right. I eventually came to understand churches as three-dimensional icons — another idea I learned from Alexei — embassies of the New Jerusalem, the Christian’s ultimate home.
Alexei was born in Moscow in 1959 into a rarefied community of scientists and mathematicians, many of whom were crucial to the Soviet enterprise — but not necessarily members of the Communist Party.
His father, Mihail Lvovich Lidov, was a theoretical mathematician working in celestial mechanics. Mihail’s parents were Jewish, but became atheists after embracing Bolshevism. His father changed their name from Kotner to Lidov. A Trotskyite, Mihail’s father was sent to the gulag in the 1930s. He survived and was released in the 1950s — a past that would come to haunt his son.
Despite this, Mihail became responsible for charting the orbits of the Soviet Luna missions to the moon. Alongside a Japanese astro-scientist, he discovered the Lidov-Kozai Resonance, which describes how the atmosphere “breathes.” For this work, he received the Lenin Prize, the Soviet Union’s highest honor. He died in 1993. That same year, asteroid 4236, orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, was named after him.
Mihail had served in World War II, which allowed him to enter Moscow State University despite being the son of an “Enemy of the People” — a background that typically barred entry. When he was elected Komsomol secretary for his class, his father's history came to light. Some called for his dismissal, but his classmates defended him. According to Alexei, one of the officials who spoke in his father’s favor was none other than Mikhail Gorbachev.
Alexei’s mother, Diana Georgievna Sedykh, was also a mathematician. In the last 25 years of her life, she dedicated herself to helping children in an orphanage in Severodvinsk. Both parents taught at Moscow State University. Though they divorced when Alexei was three, they remained close friends.
His father, who never spoke about his classified work, loved poetry and fiction. Alexei often told me how his father came weekly to read him Jack London stories — tales of man against nature — to help him fall asleep. He loved those times.
Alexei’s maternal grandmother, a devout Orthodox Christian, secretly had him baptized at three months old. Years later, Alexei would say he always had a sense of being Orthodox because of that baptism — despite his atheist parents’ displeasure.
Once, early in our friendship, I asked Alexei what he believed. He told me how, at 16, he longed to read the Bible. In Soviet Russia, it wasn’t illegal to own one, but it was illegal to acquire one if you didn’t already have it. It was also illegal to lend or receive one. His grandmother had a Bible, but was too afraid to lend it. So, a girl in his class who liked him— and whose family had one — lent it to him. That night, he read the Gospel of John and knew there was a God. The next day, the frightened girl demanded it back. He promptly returned it.
Naturally, his parents wanted him to study mathematics and sent him to a top school. But Alexei, true to form, refused. Instead, he studied art history at Moscow State University, earning a doctorate with a dissertation on “The Mural Paintings of Akhtala,” Armenian frescoes from the early 13th century. An updated 2014 edition of that work earned him Armenia’s Order of Friendship, one of its highest state honors.
In the 1980s, Alexei worked at the Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow, eventually becoming head of the Caucasus Department. But as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989-91, he joined the protestors who barricaded the White House in Moscow to oppose the military coup. He later said: “I know for sure — and no one can convince me otherwise —that those were two bright days. It was really scary, and the fate of Russia was decided then, at least for a significant period.”
Reflecting back on those events, Alexei once told me he was amazed the Soviet Union had been brought down simply because one man began telling the truth — not some ultimate Truth, but the daily, simple truth. That man, he said, was Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Alexei, married and with a young daughter, had to reinvent himself. He founded the independent Research Center for Eastern Christian Culture. Through the 1990s, he and his family survived on research grants. His résumé was astounding: Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1994–95), residencies at the Warburg Institute, Collège de France, the Getty, the Onassis Foundation, i Tatti, Oxford, Vienna, and more. At the Getty in 2001, he first articulated hierotopy.
I remember him telling me over lunch about his first trip to Italy in the early 1990s. He brought his first wife. Back home in Russia, shelves were bare and lines long just to buy bread. As they walked past shops filled with food, she began to weep uncontrollably.
“I didn’t know how to comfort her,” he said.
The list of his accomplishments takes my breath away — over 30 books, a dozen symposia on hierotopy, his 2007 UNESCO-commissioned report on the destruction of Serbian Orthodox cultural heritage in Kosovo, his design consultations for churches including one in the Altai Mountains. How did I ever become friends with someone like that?
I grew up in a small town in Iowa. On Sept. 23, 1959 — when Alexei was just a baby — my fifth-grade class lined up to see Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev drive through Perry, Iowa, en route to visit his friend, mega-farmer Roswell Garst. Little did I know that one day, I would have a Russian friend.
Over the years after 2008, Alexei — first alone, and after 2014 with his second wife Maria— traveled with my husband and I, and sometimes with friends, throughout Europe: Sweden, Denmark, London, Puglia, Rome, Florence, Venice, Ravenna and Torcello. In the ancient church of Santa Maria Assunta on Torcello, Alexei explained that art historians had a duty to photograph places like this — even when photography was forbidden. Then, boldly and with no apology, he took a picture of the 1008 mosaic of the Last Judgment —the only one of its kind in the world.
In 2013, Alexei joined us in Aix-en-Provence, France, where I was speaking at a gathering of Christians in the arts. I was nervous having him in the audience. One day at lunch, Alexei looked at me and said, “Roberta, we have been friends for five years now. It is time you learned to pronounce my name correctly! It is not Uh-leck’-see, but Ah’-leck-syea.” I tried.
From Alexei I learned about hierotopy, of course, but also about spatial icons, performative icons, iconicity and more. All of it enriched my own thinking. On a visit to Denmark, I took him to Vejleå Church in the Copenhagen suburb of Ishøj. It was the church that had first introduced me to the work of Peter Brandes, another dear friend who died in January of this year. I wondered what Alexei would think of this contemporary church. Would it meet the standards of hierotopy or iconicity?
Alexei sat quietly near the back of the church for some time. Finally, I said we had to go.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“It is a monument,” he replied.
I exhaled in relief.
Later, Alexei met Peter Brandes and his wife, Maja Lisa Engelhardt, and the two men formed a deep friendship. In 2022, they collaborated on a conference and exhibition in Florence, interpreting that city as an icon of the New Jerusalem.
In 2021, Lidov and his wife visited California for the consecration of the Church at St. Michael’s Norbertine Abbey in Silverado Canyon. This photo, taken before the concert on the evening before in the not-quite-completed library designed by Maja Lisa Engelhardt of Denmark.
No longer an observer
In 2019, we helped sponsor what would be Alexei’s final conference on hierotopy, held at the Russian Academy of Arts in Moscow: “The Hierotopy of Air and Heavens in the Culture of the Christian World.” After it concluded, Peter, Maja, Maria, Alexei and we journeyed through the places closest to Alexei’s heart — Ladoga, St. Petersburg, Novgorod, and towns of the Golden Ring, including Suzdal and Vladimir. The journey was a testament to the esteem in which he was held: locked churches were opened, closed doors unlocked.
Three memories stand out.
First, in Novgorod, once known as the “Jerusalem of Russia,” we visited the Church of the Transfiguration, built in 1374 and frescoed in 1378 by Theophanes the Greek, trained in Constantinople. It was late afternoon, the door locked. Alexei made a call, and soon someone arrived with a key.
Inside, we were enveloped in wonder. Damaged and worn, the frescoes still radiated glory. Alexei said they pulled back the curtain between this world and the next — we stood in the living presence of saints and of Christ in Glory. These are the only surviving frescoes by Theophanes, who later mentored Andrei Rublev.
Second, after Peter and Maja returned to Moscow, the rest of us continued along the Golden Ring. At the Voskresensky Monastery — New Jerusalem — founded by Patriarch Nikon in 1656, we walked on a cold, rainy day beneath a sky that gifted us with a rainbow.
The Istra River stood in for the Jordan; the Church of the Resurrection was modeled after the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and even contained a replica of the Holy Sepulchre itself. People lined up to enter it. The monks were chanting, and the space came alive.
I was no longer an observer — I was part of it. Alexei declared it a “spatial icon,” a term I learned from him.
And third, near the end of the route, we came to the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl, commissioned around 1165 by Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky. We parked and walked along a winding path through a quiet field. Slowly, a slender white church rose on the horizon beyond the river. Inside, it is small — just enough for a few worshipers and priests. Built to commemorate Bogolyubsky’s military victory and the death of his son, it once marked the entry point for palace visitors arriving by boat.
To Alexei, it was far more: He called it “the heart of Russia.” Every year, the nearby rivers flood, isolating the church. To Alexei, this was Russia’s symbolic baptism — holy ground.
In 2019, Lidov and his wife Maria joined Roberta and her husband Howard for dinner during the Christmas holidays.
‘A bridge between worlds’
That fall, Alexei and Maria visited the U.S. and stayed with us in California over Christmas and New Year’s. Among other places, we took them to see Calvary Chapel at Biola University. J
ust the year before, Peter and Maja had transformed what had become a shabby lecture hall into a sacred space. New pews, carpet, and repainted walls accompanied Peter’s stained glass windows telling Christ’s story and Maja’s golden “resurrection wall” at the front of the cruciform space.
That wall, made of golden squares with spaces between them, was immediately embraced by students who tucked their prayers into the gaps, like Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall.
“This,” Alexei said, “is a performative icon — an icon you touch and enter, a bridge between worlds.”
Maria walked to it and began praying. I joined her. Then Alexei joined us and finally sat in quiet contemplation for almost an hour. When I asked what he thought, he said, “It is Byzantium in California.” No higher praise.
In January 2020, not knowing COVID-19 would soon halt the world, we took Alexei and Maria to the Big Island of Hawai’i — a land of hierotopy, where the very ground is sacred. We visited Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau, a traditional Hawaiian city of refuge and ancient heiaus — temples of worship. We also visited the first Protestant church in Kona. Hawaiians embraced Christianity early, and many still believe. Alexei declared the island hierotopic. My husband was ecstatic.
During the pandemic, we Zoomed. I interviewed Alexei for Religion Unplugged after Turkey converted the Chora Church back into a mosque. That church, he said, was “dedicated to the very being of God — the Trinity.”
Our last time together was in April 2024, during nearly two weeks in South Korea. Neither Alexei nor Maria had been before. There was much hierotopy. At Haeinsa Monastery, which houses over 81,000 13th century woodblocks of the Tripitaka Koreana, Alexei, despite difficulty walking, refused to miss it. This was too important. That was Alexei —very determined. He had needed that determination all his life.
Our last conversation was in Busan. I remember feeling so thankful to know him and Maria. For the past year, we had worked to help secure their U.S. visas for Alexei to serve as scholar-in-residence at Biola University in winter 2026. It looked promising.
And then came the WhatsApp message: Alexei had died.
Howard had planned to take him up to the Russian River to see the reconstructed fort near Sebastopol and Jack London’s house. That trip never happened.
But Alexei Lidov — who became a member of the Russian Academy of Arts in 2012, its deputy president in 2008 — discovered a new way of seeing the sacred. Where his father explored how the atmosphere breathes and guided objects to the moon, Alexei showed us how sacred space and art breathe with the presence of the divine. He gave us a way to understand how human creativity can build bridges between earth and heaven.
When I told Wheaton College art history professor Matthew Milliner — who had traveled with us and was mentored at Princeton by Alexei’s close friend Slobodan Ćurčić — he wrote this fitting tribute:
I first learned about Alexei in print, amazed to read an art historian defending the possibility of miracles in academic writing. When he came to lecture at Princeton during my graduate years, it was lovely to watch him rankle those committed to an entirely secular view. Upon completing my book (The Mother of the Lamb of God), I realized it took me over a decade to discover what he had casually mentioned in a footnote! He knew everything. Alexei was a true scholar, leagues beyond what Americans consider the “best” in the field. But most of all, he was a believer in the spiritual reality to which icons point—a reality he now enjoys. He has moved through the iconostasis to Christ, the resplendent image of the Father. While we still need the sacred spaces and images he helped us understand, Alexei does not. Praise be to God for the life and witness of Professor Alexei Lidov.
Alexei’s funeral was held in the church where the Vladimir Mother of God — the icon he called “the face of Byzantium” — now resides. There could be no better final resting place for my dear friend.
Roberta Ahmanson is a philanthropist, art collector and writer who started her career as a religion reporter at the San Bernadino Sun and Orange County Register. She is the co-author of “Islam at the Crossroads” and “Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion.” She is also the chairperson of The Media Project’s Board of Directors.