Ikonen-Museum

The Ikonen-Museum is Recklinghausen's standout attraction and one of the most unusual museums in Germany. Housed in a converted church building on Kirchplatz, it holds over a thousand Orthodox Christian icons from Russia, Greece, the Balkans, and the Coptic world — a collection so deep and well-displayed that it attracts art historians and religious scholars as well as general visitors.

The icons range from portable devotional pieces small enough to hold in one hand to large altar panels painted in gold leaf and egg tempera. The oldest date from the 13th century. Even if religious iconography is not your particular interest, the museum makes a compelling case: these are extraordinary objects, and seeing so many of them together in one place is genuinely different from encountering a handful in a larger general collection.

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A story
The collection was assembled largely by a single man — Heinrich Wenke, a Recklinghausen pharmacist who began buying icons in the 1920s when they were flooding out of post-revolutionary Russia. What started as a personal obsession became the foundation of the world's largest Orthodox icon collection outside the Eastern Orthodox world itself.